National Debt

Who’s more to blame the Dems or the Republicans?

both and the American people for re-electing the retards that let the debt get to over $100 trillion.

I love how the national debt is a “hot issue now” like it’s never been there before.

Over $100 trillion? I think you are off by an order of magnitude or so.

So… this national debt thing isn’t exactly new. The US has been running it up for many years. It’s not exclusively the fault of Democrats or Republicans either. All politicians have incentives to borrow money from future generations to make current voters happy.

So far, Americans didn’t care. Their own personal balance sheets are highly leveraged. Since, this wasn’t a problem for them in getting further leverage upto this point, they thought it was okay for govt too to have a similar balance sheet. Now, when people are having problems in getting further personal credit, all of a sudden national debt has become an issue too!

Americans have always cared. One of the reasons Clinton was so popular was because he balanced the budget over his last few years. The debt has recently become more of a hot topic issue because it’s beginning to swell with deficits of increasing size. I think the ballpark would be around $12 or $13 Trillion in debt (but I’m not really sure).

@nuppal: I’ve been harping on this issue since my freshman year in college as the single biggest problem facing this nation (partially because it actually encompasses so many others: healthcare, medicare, medicaid, SS, budget deficits, taxation, etc.) @theta: nope I am not, call me old fashioned but I consider unfunded liabilities debt;)

adavydov7 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > @theta: nope I am not, call me old fashioned but I > consider unfunded liabilities debt;) That’s absurd. If a company takes out an $800,000 30 year mortgage at 6% on a $1,000,000 property they own, total payments on that loan would be over $1.7M. Would you say they have $1.7M in debt?

if 1.7MM is the PV of that obligation how is it absurd? $100 trillion+ is the actuarial PV of our governments obligations.

It’s at about $12.4 trillion right now…almost double what it was a decade ago. THAT is why it is a hot issue (though I agree that it should have been a much greater concern to everyone long before we reached this point).

http://grandviewphotographyaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/194904barack-make-it-rain.gif

Medicare+SS=$106.4 trillion. There are plenty other sources out there if you look. Yes the popularized figure is $11-15 trillion, but we are going to to have to pay SS and medicare right? Otherwise why do we have a deduction for these on every single paycheck? Here’s one from a while back: http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/14/taxes-social-security-opinions-columnists-medicare.html

adavydov7 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > if 1.7MM is the PV of that obligation how is it > absurd? $100 trillion+ is the actuarial PV of our > governments obligations. $1.7M isn’t the PV, it’s the total value of the payments. $800K is the PV. You’re going to have a tough time getting me too concerned about US debt while our obligations are still trading at par or better.

NakedPuts Wrote: > $1.7M isn’t the PV, it’s the total value of the > payments. $800K is the PV. Exactly, which is what the $100 trillion is. Its a PV not just the sum of all payments we are going to have to make, lol. I don’t even want to think about what those would equal (luckily I don’t have to since its not at all pertinent here). Par or not have you looked at the maturity of the debt we are using to fund this stuff? Now compare that with the maturity of these social obligations. Now factor in interest rates and the rate of debt creation over the last 18 months. Knowing that rates have nowhere to go but up and that funding long term liabilities with short-term funding has led many successful companies into bankruptcy how are you not concerned?

Are you seriously positing the idea that the US won’t be able to roll it’s debt? There’s a big difference between the PV of the liabilities you speak of and those of a corporation - both government liabilities and revenues can be changed legislatively. More importantly, the PV of government revenues are between $160T and 250T depending on your assumptions, so we’re doing pretty good.

I am positing the idea that rolling our debt and increasing rates will quickly cause interest payments to quickly outstrip debt repayments, becoming a major part of the structural deficits that cannot be maintained long term. Sure this can all be changed legislatively, but do you see any meaningful movement or even talk of any of these issues by our politicians? No! All we see is political posturing! Now think back 4 or 5 years, did you hear any talk then? No! Anything in the interim? Not really. These problems have been around but because they are so LT in nature and don’t directly impact the next election cycle politicians don’t give two sh!ts about them! Pretty sure those revenues that you mention are already allocated and going to pay for many other things, hence my use of the term UNFUNDED when referring to these liabilities and our debt!

Who cares? The Fed will keep the printing press rolling so they can buy treasuries forever… oh wait. m