Everlasting Debt

[El Supremo]

Despite centuries of distaste for debt, the United States will be nearly $10 trillion in debt by Election Day 2008.

It has promised another $50 trillion or so in explicit and implicit benefits to be paid in the future—a number that has almost doubled during the presidency of George W. Bush; in fiscal parlance, these are “unfunded liabilities,” which businesses and state and local governments are forced to report on their books—but the federal government is not.

To put these numbers in varying perspectives, $50 trillion is equal to nearly 100 percent of Americans’ total net worth—everything that we as individuals, as businesses, and as a country own. It also adds up to a cool half a million dollars in debt for every American household. These numbers exclude an additional $2 trillion in state and local government debt and unfunded liabilities for employee pension and health care benefits. They also exclude Americans’ $2 trillion in consumer debt and $10 trillion in total personal debt, which rose to 130 percent of disposable income in 2007, a statistic made more haunting by the late-2007 credit crunch that may lead to at least one million home foreclosures and two million personal bankruptcy filings in 2008....

http://bulletin.aarp.org/opinions/othervoices/articles/everlasting_debt_.html

From Forgive Us Our Debts: The Intergenerational Dangers of Fiscal Irresponsibility by Andrew L. Yarrow, Yale University Press, 2008.

[kimmerspixelated]

1. By the Greening of business

and alternative energy, and pretty much alternative everything, since more and more investors see that green is hot and definitely the big wave of the future, we can turn that debt around! That's why we need Al Gore more than ever!

[derby378]

2. "Mr. President, the People's Republic of China Collection Agency is on line two..."

Wonder if he'd hand over the deed to Alaska if pressed to settle his debt?

[Mojambo]

3. Reaganomics. Endgame.

It worked just how they planned.

All that's left to do now is throw out the last of the scrap metal framework of the New Deal.