Here's pause for thought.

Trillion with a T

On the topic of debt, you may have read that, last week, Congress raised the national debt limit to $9 trillion. That is a 9 with 12 zeros… a number so huge that it’s hard to wrap our mind around it. So, to get a better understanding, what could you do with $9 trillion?

* If you spent a million dollars a day for a million days (2,739 years), it would sum up to $1 trillion.

* To blow $1 trillion in the average American life span of 77 years, you’d have to spend $35,580,857 every day from the day you were born.

* On September 13, 2005, Oprah Winfrey gave a $16,882 Pontiac G6 sedan to every member of her studio audience. For $9 trillion, she could have given Pontiacs to every man, woman, and child in the United States, Canada, and Mexico—with enough left over to cheer up residents of Central America and the Caribbean.

* If you like cash better, you could hand every man, woman and child in the world $1,500.

* $9 trillion would buy you 3 million tons of $93-per-ounce Beluga caviar.

* Or you could build 28 Eiffel Towers made out of pure gold.

* For the less decadent, it would buy a lifetime supply of Charmin toilet paper or 1,000 bottles of Coke for every person on the planet.

* And if Wal-Mart—which made $258 billion in 2005—could be persuaded to dedicate all its revenue to paying off the national debt, the problem could be solved in less than 36 years.

Source: Casey Research





I see the title got truncated to 9 bucks; I bet Dubya wished!

And here's a bet you can collect when my youngest great-grandchild turns 80 years old: the USA will never pay off its debt. On a first-in, first-out basis, with interest paid before principal, the USA still owes money on world war one, the great depression, world war two, the cold war, the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Under the current two-party system and lobbyist legislation, the Republicans will continue trying to outspend the liberal Democrats, and they will see the Clinton years as an exception to the general rule of being unable to pay down the debt.

When Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the unfunded portion of the military service and civil service retirement systems all go bankrupt, they'll be a collapse of several economic factors. Your Gray Panthers will strap on combat boots and bandoliers and storm both houses of Congress.

I'll bet the debt reaches over $12 trillion and never again sees the south side of nine trillion.

But I'm often wrong. Perhaps the Bushites will slash the defense budget by 80% tomorrow.

There is a two-tiered way of eliminating the debt burden. First, grow the economy and lower taxes, to stimulate it, and generate more revenue. And Second, once that is accomplished, reign in spending. I will give Bush good marks on the former, but horrible ones on the later. Now that the economy is doing so well, it is well past time to start cutting back on the spending part.

The budget surpluses of the late 90s is a result of the economy outstripping spending, pure and simple. However, in the presence of a recession, the surpluses will become less, as revenues become smaller. We went through a horrible deflationary spiral that caused this deep recession in 2001.

But as right now, it is simply sinful for us NOT to be bringing in more than we send out. Something MUST be done here, and it should involve BOTH parties.

Further, Classical economics work. It is important that even the left realize that lowered taxes will get them more money to use for social programs. Class warfare hurts EVERYONE! It is counter-productive, and least to less growth in the economy, as taxpayers have less of an incentive to invest.

JohnL, what are the chances, under our current federal system of budgeting, that we will ever have more than a couple years of trivial budget surpluses? If you could apply GAAP to the federal budget process, you'd include the mountains of unpaid pension costs that never are calculated. Or, you could just operate the pension plans as pension plans, with separate sets of books, completely apart from the governmental "profit and loss" annual statements of revenue and expenses.

The Clinton surpluses were anomalies or sea anemenoes (sp ). I liked Reagan's two-tier system for personal income tax brackets: 15% and 28%, which kept capital gains capped at 28%. Even 28% taxation approaches confiscation, when you add in the state and local taxes as well.

I won't admit that lower tax rates create more total tax revenue, though. But that's another thread, probably beyond my knowledge.

This massive debt is caused by the Bush Junior war-machine. He is spending billions on the Whermacht and Bushstapo. Bush Junior has turned the US armed services into a branch of the defucnt nazi war machine. Seik Heil !

that is because you are thinking in 'static' terms. The economy is 'dynamic', and not subject to rigid rules.

If businesses can reap more revenue by increasing traffic at lower prices, then why can't the government do the same. As a manager of a Cracker Barrel store in Tennessee, before they went national, II remember Danny Evans, the owner, constantly harping on the need to create more traffic. "Don't worry all that much about food cost, or labour cost percentages. Use good relations, serve good food, lots of it, and keep the customer happy, and they will flock in." He was right! Selling a low cost, good product, and offering fine service helped make it the company that it is today.

Remember, the more of a 'wedge'(taxes) you place between the producer and the consumer, the less of something you will get. The lower the 'wedge', the more of it you will reap.






By The Way, your Intellectual flatulance does stink! Have you tried changing your diet, or perhaps taking BeanO?

I know virtually nothing about actuarial science, but even as a kid 50-some years ago, reading little more than the Chicago Tribune and Reader's Digest, I remember articles written by the current or past chief actuaries of the Social Security system. They repeatedly said there was no actuarial accuracy to the 'pension' part of SS (the first three letters of OASDI). As I now draw upon the "Social Security Trust Fund," I ponder where my money comes from. I suspect my old buddies, the revenue officers of the IRS, are almost literally running down the street to collect overdue taxes so there will be a deposit in my checking account on the 2nd of each month. Doesn't that "Trust Fund" consist of nothing more than IOU's from individual federal agencies, and that biggest and phoniest IOU of all, treasury bonds?

We've seen the SS ratios: something like 7 workers paying in for every pensioner receiving benefits, only a few decades ago, to maybe now there are2.4 workers who are helping to finance my pension, to less than 2.0 in the foreseeable future. My grandkids won't pay in enough to support my kids in old age.

Where will all the unfunded pension money (SS, CSRS, FERS, and military pensions) come from? Surely not from donations by Congressmen.

JohnL, maybe I'm the only one here who's exaggerating or oversimplifying. But when you say we need to lower federal taxes so that we'll increase revenue, you're drawing a supply/demand/price curve that may be too flat or too steep. How much can the USA's economy grow in the next two decades, to pay all the pension plans? 9% a year, with zero inflation?

And the federal debt, which is linked to the pension plans. Will it be paid off simply by 'growing the economy"? How many million illegal immigrants will that take, since most White folks other than this gay man haven't been replacing themselves biologically for decades?