Michael Snyder
Activist Post
The U.S. national debt is 36 times larger than it was just 40 years ago. That is not a misprint. That is actually the truth. We are literally destroying the future of America, but most Americans don’t really seem to care. In fact, the most hated politicians in America are the Tea Party politicians that recently tried to take a stand against the out of control borrowing that the federal government has been doing.
Pew Research has just released a new survey that shows that the popularity of the Tea Party is at an all-time low. So while many Americans may say that they theoretically want something to be done about the national debt, when push comes to shove they don’t actually mean that. You see, the reality of the matter is that about 128 million Americans get money from the federal government every month. That accounts for the majority of all government spending. Anyone who tries to take those goodies away is going to be hated. So we are going to continue down this crazy path until the system completely crashes someday.
The “deal” that was just made in Congress does nothing to reduce our spending or control the growth of our debt. It just kicks the decisions about government spending and the debt ceiling down the road for a few months.
In fact, the agreement on the debt ceiling did not actually place any limits on how much the federal government can borrow over the next few months. It just temporarily suspended enforcement of the debt ceiling. So the federal government could technically go out and borrow trillions of dollars during the next few months and nobody could do anything about it.
Let’s hope that does not happen.
And of course the “debt deal” contained all kinds of pork that will benefit certain politicians that were instrumental in putting together the deal.
When are the American people finally going to get sick and tired of this kind of thing?
Meanwhile, our debt problem continues to get even worse. The following are 33 stats that prove that SOMETHING desperately needs to be done about the national debt…
#1 The U.S. national debt is on pace to more than double during Obama’s eight years in the White House. In other words, under Barack Obama the United States will accumulate more debt than it did under all of the other presidents in U.S. history combined.
#2 During fiscal year 2013, the U.S. Treasury paid off $7,546,726,000,000 in maturing U.S. government debt and issued $8,323,949,000,000 in new debt. In fiscal year 2014 those numbers will be even larger.
#3 In September, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 1.981 percent. In January 2000, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 6.620 percent. If we got back to that level today, it would collapse our entire financial system.
#4 Between 2008 and 2012, the ratio of government debt to government income increased from 4.0 to 6.6.
#5 Between 2008 and 2012, U.S. government debt grew by 60.7 percent, but U.S. GDP only grew by a total of about 8.5 percent during that entire time period.
#6 Since 2007, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio has increased from 66.6 percent to 101.6 percent.
#7 A revised IMF policy paper entitled “U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.
#8 At this point, the federal government hands out money to approximately 128 million Americans every single month. In case you were wondering, that is about 41.3 percent of the population of the entire country.
#9 Back in 1980, the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion dollars. Today, it is rapidly approaching 17 trillion dollars.
#10 Since the year 2000, the size of the U.S. national debt has grown by more than 11 trillion dollars.
#11 During Barack Obama’s first four years in the White House, the amount of new debt accumulated by the federal government breaks down to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States.
#12 The United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain.
#13 At this point, the United States government is responsible for about a third of all the government debt in the entire world.
#14 According to the U.S. Treasury, foreigners hold approximately 5.6 trillion dollars of our debt.
#15 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.
#16 If the federal government used GAAP accounting standards like publicly traded corporations do, the real federal budget deficit for 2011 would have been 5 trillion dollars instead of 1.3 trillion dollars.
#17 As I noted recently, if the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills it would circle the earth at the equator 45 times.
#18 How much money is one trillion dollars? If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.
#19 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.
#20 If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 189,000 years to pay it off.
#21 The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first established in 1913.
#22 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.
#23 The federal government is stealing close to 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day.
#24 Historically, the interest rate on 10-year U.S. Treasuries has averaged 6.68 percent. If the average interest rate on U.S. government debt rose to that level today, the U.S. government would find itself spending more than a trillion dollars per year just on interest on the national debt.
#25 Federal spending on entitlement programs has been increasing six times faster than population growth has.
#26 Overall, the federal government runs nearly 80 different “means-tested welfare programs“, and almost all of them are experiencing explosive growth.
#27 According to a Government Accountability Office report that was released earlier this year, Obamacare is going to cause the federal debt to rise by $6.2 trillion.
#28 If you can believe it, today more than 70 million Americans are on Medicaid, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
#29 As I have written about previously, the number of Americans on Medicare is projected to grow from a little bit more than 50 million today to 73.2 million in 2025.
#30 Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.
#31 It is being projected that the number of Americans on Social Security will rise from about 62 million today to more than 100 million in 25 years.
#32 Overall, the Social Security system is facing a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.
#33 Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff is warning that the U.S. government is facing a gigantic tsunami of unfunded liabilities in the coming years that we are counting on our children and our grandchildren to pay. Kotlikoff speaks of a “fiscal gap” which he defines as “the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue”. His calculations have led him to the conclusion that the federal government is facing a fiscal gap of 222 trillion dollars in the years ahead.
Our financial situation is clearly not even close to sustainable. We are heading for an inevitable collapse, but in the aftermath of the “deal” in Congress, Barack Obama declared that all Americans “need to stop focusing on the lobbyists, and the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio”.
Apparently he does not want you reading articles like this or listening to radio programs that are warning about the dangers of our national debt.
At the same time, the U.S. government continues to waste money in some of the most bizarre ways imaginable. It is almost as if they don’t even care that they are destroying the future of our children and our grandchildren with their incredibly reckless spending.
And of course the mainstream media is very much on the side of the big spenders. In recent weeks, those who identify themselves with the Tea Party have been endlessly called names on the big mainstream news networks even though they are just about the only ones that are trying to pull us back from the path to self-destruction that we are on.
The big mainstream news networks have portrayed those that identify with the Tea Party as idiots and morons, but the truth is that studies have found that Tea Partiers are better educated, more scientifically literate and have higher incomes than the general population.
The real idiots and morons are the ones that want us to continue down this road to financial oblivion. We have accumulated the largest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and unless something dramatic is done, America is not going to have any kind of a future.
This article first appeared here at the American Dream. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.
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