Posted on 10/03/2018 12:49:31 PM PDT by fugazi
Congress admits to having already spent $21.5 trillion (that’s $21,500,000,000,000.00) they don’t have. If you are a taxpayer, your share is a little over $58,000. What your senators and representatives would rather you didn’t know is that our reported debt is like an iceberg: what you see is only the tip. 90 percent of the iceberg lies under the surface.
The dirty little secret is that we are obligated to pay around $115 trillion – on top of the national debt – to programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.
[...]
Altogether, the U.S. federal government has run up a $136.5 trillion bill that will have to be paid, using figures from usdebtclock.org. Accounting for the unfunded liabilities, every single taxpayer in America is currently on the hook for just under $1 million dollars. And that doesn’t count the $10 trillion or so of local and state debt and unfunded liabilities.
What does $136.5 trillion look like?
If the Treasury Department printed out 136.5 trillion one-dollar bills, it would cost us $7.6 trillion. It would take the Bureau of Engraving and Printing over 200 years to stamp out the notes. And since our currency is made of 75 percent cotton, we would need to commandeer every cotton farm in the United States. For the next 28 years.
If you started a stack of our crisp, new dollar bills on your coffee table, you could keep stacking until you reached the moon, which is close to 238,855 miles above your table. You’d have enough bills left over from our pile of 136.5 trillion to do 38 more stacks to the moon. If you were to tape the bills end-to-end, the line could wrap around the world 531,000
(Excerpt) Read more at victoryinstitute.net ...
Growth is the only way out
While these are commitments, we do have associated tax income to help take care of those expenses.
It's kind of like loading my personal balance sheet with actuarial elder care expenses for Mom and Dad. Yeah that was always lurking out there and thank God they bought long term care insurance, but I wouldn't have put that on my balance sheet.
While these are commitments, we do have associated tax income to help take care of those expenses.
It's kind of like loading my personal balance sheet with actuarial elder care expenses for Mom and Dad. Yeah that was always lurking out there and thank God they bought long term care insurance, but I wouldn't have put that on my balance sheet.
I would argue that there isn’t any amount of growth that could out-earn what today’s Congress can spend. A balanced budget PLUS a banging economy could do it, but we would be right back where we started as soon as we elect someone that isn’t a free market capitalist.
Either way, we need a Convention of States to restore the check and balance that states lost when we passed the 17th Amendment, making U.S. senators popularly elected instead of appointed by the state legislatures. We already had the House of Representatives, and the 17th Amdt. meant that instead of representing the states’ interests, they served the federal government.
Growth doesn’t hurt. But growth alone can’t solve the problem. We would need massive spending reductions and the elimination of medicare plus some sort of recalibration of Social Security to get things under control. Nobody will do that.
“I Owe You”... We should demand they carve that over the front door to the Treasury Building if spending isn’t brought under control. Wouldn’t look half bad in Latin.
You can’t look at just future liabilities and count that as debt without looking also at future income as an offset. Even the $21 T includes several T that we simply owe ourselves (the SS fund, largely). SS payments could always be reduced or delayed.
When more people are working, more FICA contributes to those programs.
If Trump can eliminate all the waste, especially illegals and other like leeches, and continues to build the workforce, there will be no SS crisis.
Actually, I've never thought SS was in jeopardy.
When we reach the point where something HAS to actually be cut, it will probably be the right things that get cut.
Nothing will happen until then so I don’t worry about it.
“Altogether, the U.S. federal government has run up a $136.5 trillion bill that will have to be paid, using figures from usdebtclock.org. Accounting for the unfunded liabilities, every single taxpayer in America is currently on the hook for just under $1 million dollars. And that doesn’t count the $10 trillion or so of local and state debt and unfunded liabilities.”
It’s never going to paid off. Unless they inflate the currency to Zimbabwian heights.
Meaningless unless they tell us over how many years those obligations will become due. Even if that information is provided later in the article, the writer shouldn't stick that sentence near the top or the article with no mention of when the obligations become due.
Sometimes I wonder if folks who write such things even realize that the obligations become due over many years, or if they just like to write doomsday articles.
Not minimizing the problem, but it's just sloppy reporting to not put our long term obligations in context. And most everything I see on this subject does not.
With Republicans running both houses of Congress?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Don’t despair!
Skeptics laughed when Trump announced he would repair NYC’s Wollman Rink.
Trump had the last laugh on THEM, didn’t he?
I’m a born and raised NYer....LaGuardia to Bloomberg, so yeah, I remember. But he only had to fight Kotch and a bunch of RATS then. Now he not only has to fight the RATS, but the Repubicans as well.
Remember, it was the ass-wipe GOP Congress and their profligate spending practices that got FReepers first talking about America needing a second tea party back in ‘06. The R basturds we’ve got in there now are no different. Matter of fact, a bunch of the old crew are still around infecting today’s legislatures.
The author’s statement of “If you are a taxpayer, your share is a little over $58,000.” is misleading (too low) there are about 244,250,000 tax returns filed every year, so the total per family/single return is more like $88,511.00, and with “progressive” tax rates probably more like $200,000. per “real taxpayer” to pay off the current debt.
Debt up $1.66 Trillion so far under President Trump.
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current
Might wanna hang onto that one!
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