Senate extends US debt limit a further $850 billion.

[Jasper]

The Senate voted 53-42 to raise the debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion, the fifth increase in the U.S. credit limit since President George W. Bush took office in January 2001. The U.S. House of Representatives approved the higher debt limit earlier this year as part of the overall budget resolution and the legislation now goes to Bush for his signature.

"We have no choice but to approve it. If we fail to raise the debt ceiling soon, the U.S. Treasury will default for the first time in its history," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus.
Reuters (http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2007-09-28T003622Z_01_N27415556_RTRIDST_0_USA-CONGRESS-DEBT-UPDATE-1.XML)

How high can this go, without something catastrophic happening?

[Eduardo X]

Oh sweet! I was thinking just this morning that our currency is totally over-valued.

[Dirt]

At least interest rates are still low.

[Unicorn McGriddle]

Well shit, why don't they just raise it to a centillion and forget about it? For a few years, I mean.

[Phil_Stein]

In theory, they could abolish the debt ceiling, as obviously it's the idea of allowing the US to default on its debt would not be seriously considered by real politicians (unless something FAR FAR worse than anything we've seen in the last couple centuries occurse). This is just a bit of political theater - a chance for folks to vote no as a way to show their distaste for the national debt and annual deficits.

FWIW, our national debt, in relation to our GDP, is not that bad compared to many other countries, and also not that bad compared to where it was in the aftermath of WW2. I'm too lazy to find a graph, but I'd imagine you can find the data if you do a good search for it.

[Enidigm]

But the debt at the end of WW2 was owned primarly by Americans - and to a greater extent than today, individual Americans and not corporations. And as far as the overseas accounts goes, it was the rest of the world owing the US due to Lend-Lease than the other way around.

The problem with the debt isn't that it's large but that it becomes increasingly unlikely to ever be paid off (that is, the public debt is reduced to near zero) and even though the market assumes right now a chance of a default to be around 0% it's when that chance starts creeping around 2-4% among some analysts that the real potential for collapse will set in.

Right now the inflationary pressure of debt is being held in check by overseas stockpiles of dollars. Simply an unwillingness to increase that stockpile the next round will cause inflationary pressures to resume.

[Phil_Stein]

There's no particular reason why we should pay the debt down to near 0. I think the last president to make a serious attempt at that was Andrew Jackson. (History majors, feel free to correct me).

Frankly, I'm more worried about other issues, like funding social security and other promised benefits.

But if we're just talking about the national debt and its close cousin, the deficit, let's look at some numbers:

According to TreasuryDirect (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np), while the total public debt is about $9 trillion, about $3.9 trillion of that is intra-governmental.

So our public national debt is about $5.1 trillion. We have a GDP (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html) of about $13.16 trillion (2006). So our public debt is about 39% of GDP. As our economy grows, that existing debt effectively shrinks (relative to the economy). But of course, the budget deficit adds to the debt each year.

Our economy is growing at about 3% real, or roughly 5-5.5% nominal. Since most of the debt is priced in nominal terms, our existing debt is effectively shrinking, relative to GDP, at about 5-5.5% per year. At 5.25% nominal GDP growth, the breakeven figure for annual deficits, where our debt holds constant relative to GDP, is about $472 billion using the larger $9 trillion total debt figure, or $267 billion using the $5.1 trillion public debt figure. When we see the typical report that the deficit in year X was $YYY billion, I'm not actually sure which debt figure that should be compared to.

I'd certainly like to see our annual deficit shrink, to the point where the debt comes down further relative to GDP. While the current figures aren't ideal, they're not terribly alarming either, IMO.

[Dirt]

Is 5.1 trillion the principal or does that include interest?

[Phil_Stein]

It's the principal. Whenever you say the debt of anything is $XYZ, you're talking about the principal (or at least, you should be).

[skedastic]

No, it includes interest, just like any other debt. In other words: Phil, huh?

[Phil_Stein]

You pay interest on the debt. But the debt total itself does not include interest. I think Dirt was confused.

If I have a $100K mortgage, that's the principal of my mortgage.

If I pay $800/month on that mortgage, then a portion of my payment may be for interest, and a portion to reduce the principal (and there may be other things in there too, like taxes and insurance).

Maybe it's just the terminology used. Even though principal basically means the overall debt, that's not normally how we describe the size of a debt - we don't generally talk about a debt as being $XXX dollars in principal. Principal is usually used in describing how much of a (monthly/annual/etc) payment is used to reduce the size of the debt, as opposed to simply paying the interest and/or fees and taxes and such.

[skedastic]

The "principal" is the initial amount borrowed. At any given subsequent time, the "debt" is the sum of the principal and the accumulated interest on the principal, minus the present value of all payments to that date. Thus, the debt does definitely include the interest, and the national debt, like any other, includes interest the government owes on the amounts it initially borrowed. If the government otherwise ran a balanced budget but didn't pay off any of the outstanding debt, the outstanding debt would grow at a rate equal to the interest rate, not stay fixed.

[Slainte Mhath]

Maybe if America owed that $5.1 trillion to credit card companies Congress would finally get off it's ass and get serious about passing legislation to limit the outrageous 35% interest rates those companies can charge consumers for practically any reason they deem worthy.

It's not the national debt that's going to sink our economy, it's the personal one carried by damn near every American.

[Jasper]

Hmmm, but what happens if the national debt starts to cause inflation? Might that be the sort of thing that could trigger a broad personal credit crisis?

[Jasper]

Right now the inflationary pressure of debt is being held in check by overseas stockpiles of dollars. Simply an unwillingness to increase that stockpile the next round will cause inflationary pressures to resume.
This has already started to happen from what I've read, with holdings increasingly being in Euros as well as other currencies. The dollar is still the predominant currency, but not only are other countries uninclined to increase their dollar holdings, they seem to be be starting to hedge their bets away from the dollar.

[Jasper]

In theory, they could abolish the debt ceiling, as obviously it's the idea of allowing the US to default on its debt would not be seriously considered by real politicians (unless something FAR FAR worse than anything we've seen in the last couple centuries occurse). This is just a bit of political theater - a chance for folks to vote no as a way to show their distaste for the national debt and annual deficits.
42 US Senators in fact voted against raising the debt ceiling -- I suppose they're not real politicians?

There is another option besides printing money ("raising the debt ceiling" is such a great euphemism!) or going bust -- you can cut spending. Say, oh, like our gratuitous overseas military adventures, or Bush's "Starve the Beast" tax cuts for the most wealthy. I'm pretty sure the 42 dissenting Senators were advocating something along these lines rather than bankrupting the US government.

[Phil_Stein]

42 US Senators in fact voted against raising the debt ceiling -- I suppose they're not real politicians?

They're real politicians, but they're making a gesture.

Given an absolute choice between defaulting on the debt and raising the debt ceiling, I'm pretty confident most/all would choose the former.

Yes, of course you can cut spending (or raise taxes). But that presumably wasn't going to happen (to a sufficient degree to matter) in the days/weeks/months before we passed the old debt ceiling.

If these 42 are so strongly against deficit spending, they're free to find 8 or 9 other supporters and balance the budget so that we won't have to bump up the debt ceiling again in a year or three.

[Funkula]

Latter?

[jpinard]

Phil, you're forgetting one giant aspect of the debt situation. The mount of money this country pays out to debt and interest could be funding health and human services... or social security. As the dollar is de-valued, in essence we borrow less money for the same dollar we did 10 years ago.

GDP means very little when so many wealthy elite are moving their funds and companies to 3rd world countries or tax shelters aka a Grand Cayman Islanss Company.

[Aeon221]

There's no particular reason why we should pay the debt down to near 0. I think the last president to make a serious attempt at that was Andrew Jackson. (History majors, feel free to correct me).

Frankly, I'm more worried about other issues, like funding social security and other promised benefits.

But if we're just talking about the national debt and its close cousin, the deficit, let's look at some numbers:

According to TreasuryDirect (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np), while the total public debt is about $9 trillion, about $3.9 trillion of that is intra-governmental.

So our public national debt is about $5.1 trillion. We have a GDP (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html) of about $13.16 trillion (2006). So our public debt is about 39% of GDP. As our economy grows, that existing debt effectively shrinks (relative to the economy). But of course, the budget deficit adds to the debt each year.

Our economy is growing at about 3% real, or roughly 5-5.5% nominal. Since most of the debt is priced in nominal terms, our existing debt is effectively shrinking, relative to GDP, at about 5-5.5% per year. At 5.25% nominal GDP growth, the breakeven figure for annual deficits, where our debt holds constant relative to GDP, is about $472 billion using the larger $9 trillion total debt figure, or $267 billion using the $5.1 trillion public debt figure. When we see the typical report that the deficit in year X was $YYY billion, I'm not actually sure which debt figure that should be compared to.

I'd certainly like to see our annual deficit shrink, to the point where the debt comes down further relative to GDP. While the current figures aren't ideal, they're not terribly alarming either, IMO.

Aren't most government bonds indexed to the CPI these days (rhetorical question, because the answer is a qualified yes)? How is inflation helping reduce the real value of the debt when payments on it are linked to inflation?

Color me confused and paint me candy flavored.

[Phil_Stein]

jpinard - Of course it would be nice not to have to pay interest on the debt. But to do so, we'd have to pay the debt off, and to do THAT, we'd have to run huge budget surpluses for many years, which would require tremendous belt tightening, be politically unrealistic, and economically harmful.

The last reasonably major debtor nation that I'm aware of that tried to pay off its debt, as opposed to eliminating its deficit, was Romania, in the 1980s. You can read a brief bit about it on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C5%9Fescu). The results were apparently very painful for the public.

And GDP is still a very meaningful figure.



Aeon221 - TIPS (the major kind of US inflation indexed bond) were only introduced in the late 1990s, and are still, IIUC, a very small percentage of overall US bonds outstanding. I can't find figures though.

[Shadarr]

It's not the national debt that's going to sink our economy, it's the personal one carried by damn near every American.
Why does it need to be either/or? Throw the trade deficit on the pile while you're at it!

[Aeon221]

Aeon221 - TIPS (the major kind of US inflation indexed bond) were only introduced in the late 1990s, and are still, IIUC, a very small percentage of overall US bonds outstanding. I can't find figures though.

Me either, but I'd assume that a saavy investor would choose an indexed bond over a free floater (unless they expect either favorable trends or a higher ROI, both of which are risky strategies, and therefore unlikely if you assume a majority of risk averse investors), so the trend would be towards indexed bonds. Even if they aren't currently in the majority, they are so superior to the other sort that they will inevitably become the majority vehicle.

[Jason McCullough]

"Savvy" investors consider predicting inflation rates half the fun of making money off bonds. :)

[Aeon221]

"Savvy" investors consider predicting inflation rates half the fun of making money off bonds. :)

I'm tempted to sell mine after this rate cut, but I'm betting on a second one sometime either during or after the holiday season. So exciting =D

[Jakub]

jpinard - Of course it would be nice not to have to pay interest on the debt. But to do so, we'd have to pay the debt off, and to do THAT, we'd have to run huge budget surpluses for many years, which would require tremendous belt tightening, be politically unrealistic, and economically harmful.

The last reasonably major debtor nation that I'm aware of that tried to pay off its debt, as opposed to eliminating its deficit, was Romania, in the 1980s. You can read a brief bit about it on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C5%9Fescu). The results were apparently very painful for the public.
Why is it unrealistic and economically harmful?

Canada went from a position where its debt and deficit were a greater percentage of GDP than America's is now and we're slowly chipping away at it, both as a percentage of GDP and as a real figure.

Canadian Federal Debt, in millions of dollars:

1997 562,881
1998 559,922
1999 554,143
2000 539,885
2001 519,994
2002 511,946
2003 505,325
2004 496,180
2005 494,717
2006 481,499

That's $80 billion over ten years. Proportionally, the United States could have taken an $800 billion chunk out of its debt in that time.

And it gets easier every year, because maintenance on debt is reduced and the economy grows!

[Phil_Stein]

Canada has a much more resource driven economy than the US, and in the last few years, most resource prices have soared. Canada may have exerted spending restraint, but things are certainly easier when the rest of the world is eager to buy (at high prices) what you're selling.

Also, according to the CIA World Factbook, as of 2006 Canada's public debt was 65.4% (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ca.html) of GDP. The same source lists the public debt of the United States at 64.7% (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html). So after paying down your debt for a while, you're just pulling even with us. :)

[Jakub]

Canada has a much more resource driven economy than the US, and in the last few years, most resource prices have soared. Canada may have exerted spending restraint, but things are certainly easier when the rest of the world is eager to buy (at high prices) what you're selling.
Resource prices were SHIT until 2004/2005.

Lows on steel, copper, aluminum, nickel, wood, zinc. Heck, even oil was at extremely low prices through 2001/2002.

[jpinard]

Exactly how good are countries doing that let their debt-load skyrocket?

As of a year ago (when we had less debt), we were spending more on interest - than was spent on: Education, Veterans Affairs and the Justice departments combined. Ironically, we keep having to let prisoners out early (including violent felons) because we can't afford to house them anymore.

Ther'es a shitload of millionaires being created in defense contractor companies... more-so than ever before. Should our tax dollars be going to private contractor firms making a smaller percent extremely wealthy while our debt-load ballons? Or maybe it would have been better to keep some of that in-house as actual soldiers who aren't making millions per year? Blackwater, Halliburton and other firms have made a killing off American tax-payers. The wealthy are paying less in taxes - meanwhile I'm on disability and my taxes have gone up 3 years in a row! So America borrows it and shifts some of the burdon to those least able to afford it? People on fixed incomes are being crushed by this economy and there is almost no help. I'm in the grey zone where I don't qualify for anything to help heat my home or to help with food. It totally sucks I can't eat a proper diet for a Cystic because it costs so much.

I also don't think our GDP won't keep pace if we keep sending jobs to India, China, and Mexico. Much of the GDP increases we've seen appear somewhat fake. Blackwater International has swelled to 28,000+ employees in the past few years (I think it's like the first or second largest employer in North Carolina now), and there's 100,000+ private contractors in Iraq. That's all being paid with newly borrowed dollars. The cost of college is becoming more and more insane making the future prospect for those that have to borrow it bleaker.

Sorry to complain. It's just painful watching all the waste in our government. Feel so hopeless sometimes... I hate feeling this way :-(

[Aeon221]

jpinard, your post is fine up until you leave the issue of governmental corruption and enter the realm of trade. International trade, by any metric you choose to analyze it, is an unmitigated good. There is no situation known to man where trade is not a good thing, and this cannot be disputed. Seriously, how can you complain about something that forces down the prices of goods when your salary is protected from the same pressures by Federally mandated wage floors?

Unless you care about income distribution. However! Trade is a very minimal contributer to issues with income distribution, and even the most fanatical of proponents for equitable income distribution amongst economists are in favor of trade -- they just want to see the gains more evenly distributed. I'm sure wikipedia has more to say on the subject of income inequality, but I've never been interested in the subject.

As to soldiers, if the government paid people better, and wasn't such a cockass of an employer, I'm sure you'd see many more people interested. But as is, they're having trouble even getting close to targets, and then only by waiving people with issues. I've got no problems with felons and whatnot serving in the military (they're citizens like the rest of us), but I'm sure that nobody likes knowing that their bunk mate went to jail for multiple counts of burglary.

[Aszurom]

The solution would be to refinance the national debt into an interest-only adjustable rate with a five year fixed interest of 4.5%

This worked pretty well for everybody else.

[jpinard]

Aeon. I wasn't trying to say trade is bad. I think the current trade situation we're isn't healthy for our economy and here's why:

1. China (despite their recent cleanup efforts around the Olympics) doesn't care about the environment. They're building some 200+ new coal plants in the next 50 years. Cost of labor aside, you already have a vast difference in the cost to manufacture goods because electric is so much cheaper there... and the difference will get greater as we start to impose decent environmental standards in our own country.

2. Benefits. Despite the wage differences, benefits are non-existent for many Indians and Chinese. As our health care costs go up, China, India, and Mexico continue to have little - > for their employees.

3. China doesn't care about intellectual property. America puts the money and effort into research and development, then China just goes and makes a copy for themselves. They end up outcompeting many American products on their own as they even replicate entire factories.

4. Inflation and the price of goods. If we were getting cheaper and cheaper items because of all the above I'd agree with you. But in the current course we're on the cost of goods is not going down. When you take the top 10% of income gatherers out of the equation, you no longer have an equitable increase of wages matched with inflation.

5. Counterfeit medication and health care products. Hoping that tube of toothpaste didn't come from China? What happens when they get spellings all correct?

I'm sure you can say, look at history and trade has never been bad. You're absolutely right according to history. Each nation most vested in open trade was by far the most prosperous. However, in history there was a balance. The competition of goods didn't need to concern itself with the complexities we have today. And in this country there aren't enough good jobs to replace those lost in the manufacturing sector to Mexico, India, and China. Sure it's good for stockholders and corporations, but you're talking about a large segment of population being asked to lower their standard of living at the expense of everything else.

If everything's so rosy, why is the #2 issue in this country the economy? If it weren't for the war in Iraq, the economy would be the #1 complaint people have right now.

Let me give you a good example. Electrolux had a plant in Greenville which had been running since the 1800's. It was profitable and had a dedicated and educated workforce. Electrolux decided they wanted MORE profit. And it was cheaper for them to build a brand new plant in Mexico and start over there. The employees even offered to take 20% pay cuts to keep their jobs and the plant and the state offered massive tax incentives to keep them here. Electrolux declined.

So... did the price of Electrolux products go down after they moved their plant to Mexico? Nope. Did those thousands of employees find comparable work and jobs here in America? No. Did the state and federal government lose lots of tax revenue? Yep. So who benefited from this? The people who run the company and those who own a lot of stock in them. Does this same thing happening over and over again in the United States somehow create new jobs and help the economy? I don't even see how you can say this trade is good for America. It's good for stockholders and nobody else. In the case of stocks you've got to HAVE money to MAKE money. So you create a situation where those breaking even will never ever get ahead in life, and those that have money can do less and less to maintain their great standard of living.

You said, "forces down the prices of goods when your salary is protected".
Like I said, the price of goods is not going down. The cost of everything is outstripping salary increases. And what good does lower priced goods even have, if a person has no income to purchase said goods? Read this article from USA Today (2002) anoiut homelessness increases because of a lack of jobs and the cost of living. Now keep in mind things are worse now than they were then. http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2003-08-11-homeless_x.htm

Middle income families are losing their jobs to other countries. Trade is an excellent thing, but not the way it's handled right now with the massive inequities that hurt us and only help competing nations. And if things "balance out" in a hundred years because standards in 3rd world countries have been raised and every jobless person Southeast Asia has a manufacturing job... what do you tell people right now? Humans have only one life to try and make it. The well-being of people in America is being sacrificed - not for the continued drop of prices in goods, but to make the wealthy elite that much richer. Just look at the difference between bottom tier and top tier salaries. The difference between now and any other time in the latter 20th century is astronomical.

Obviously if Electrolux had to pay Mexicans the kind of benefits U.S. citizens would get, and if health coverage in Mexico was as atrociously expensive as it is here they wouldn't have moved their plant.

I'd love to be proven that all is well and things are great... but I don't see it. Michigan government is about to be shut down because of the deficits we have. To me, Michigan is an example of what can happen to the whole nation. Ignoring the situation here in Michigan is like ignoring the precedent Venus set for Greenhouse gases. Venus is a little smaller and closer to the sun than Earth. Does that mean we can just ignore what happened there? Michigan isn't the entire United States, but does that mean we shouldn't be looking at what's happening here in respect to job losses, tax revenue losses, and budget deficits?

I'd love to be proven totally wrong so I can stop freaking out about the economic state of this country.

BTW, wasn't the prosperity of the 1950's due in large part to the huge amount of exporting we did to Europe?

[Aeon221]

Are you concerned with international trade or with China? Because I'm seeing nothing about such upstanding nations as Canada and Mexico, our number one and three trade partners. (http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/top/dst/2006/12/balance.html)

Furthermore, trade with China in 2006 was ~350 billion. Now, I'm not much for numbers, but I'm pretty sure that Canada's ~550 billion is a tad more significant. Almost twice as much. Furthermore, the Gov't spent ~2 trillion dollars last year, or an amount twice as large as the value of trade with our top three partners.

I'm not sure what your issue is with income in the USA (informative link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_income), because by any standard you choose, our nation is one of the wealthiest in the world. Yeah, sure, not everyone can drive a Benz. But when was the last time you heard of a famine sweeping Ohio? If your complaint is internal income inequality, I already admitted the following: 1) trade generally concentrates wealth in the hands of those who control the factors of production used most extensively in whatever good the nation in question has a comparative advantage in, and 2) this means that international trade can have an unfavorable effect on income distribution. I also mentioned that this effect is invariably minor, because the amounts involved are comparatively small (in the case of china, around 2% of GDP).

I've never heard of Electrolux, and, frankly, I couldn't care less about what some vacuum company that is only traded otc (and doesn't even have a trading history on yahoo finance) did back in the 80s.

IP violations are part of the game -- this nation was built upon them, and I expect many others to be built upon them in the future.


Like I said, the price of goods is not going down. The cost of everything is outstripping salary increases. And what good does lower priced goods even have, if a person has no income to purchase said goods? Read this article from USA Today (2002) anoiut homelessness increases because of a lack of jobs and the cost of living. Now keep in mind things are worse now than they were then.

And prices don't get to move when there are shit tons of tariffs and subsidies and whatnot that dilute the beneficial effects of free trade while allowing their negative side effects ("unfavorable" income distribution) to continue. Vote for more free trade and less subsidies and watch prices drop to the socially optimal level.

And thanks, I'll stick to my econ textbooks and The Economist over some random author from USA Today. But wanna hear my theory on those increases in homelessness? Here it is: we were in a recession! We've since experienced about five years of steady growth. This current one is sluggish, which sucks, but thats because of the housing industry (and the new debt markets it has spawned), not international trade. The only thing keeping the situation from getting worse is the free flow of capital from, you guessed it, other nations.

[SlyFrog]

jpinard - Of course it would be nice not to have to pay interest on the debt. But to do so, we'd have to pay the debt off, and to do THAT, we'd have to run huge budget surpluses for many years, which would require tremendous belt tightening, be politically unrealistic, and economically harmful.

Oh no god forbid, not belt tightening. Anything but spending billions of dollars making sure Indiana is safe from the terrorists.

Leverage to drive the economy is fine. The bullshit that we've been spending money on lately, however, is a joke.

[Midnight Son]

We owe, we owe, it's off to the pawnshop we go!

[Anti-Bunny]

Hey Poli-sci buffs: When the revolution finally comes, will the California Free State still have to help pay off this debt? Because splitting off would seem pretty tempting to get rid of the crushing weight of a quadrillion nu-yen of debt.

[Chris Nahr]

I've never heard of Electrolux, and, frankly, I couldn't care less about what some vacuum company that is only traded otc (and doesn't even have a trading history on yahoo finance) did back in the 80s.

Electrolux isn't traded much in America because it's a European company, YOU IGNORANT YANKEE. Around 60,000 employees and sales of 16 billion dollars in 2006, according to their website.

[Factory]

The last reasonably major debtor nation that I'm aware of that tried to pay off its debt, as opposed to eliminating its deficit, was Romania, in the 1980s. You can read a brief bit about it on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C5%9Fescu). The results were apparently very painful for the public.


Australia has done both, although it was starting from a lower base.
http://www.budget.gov.au/2005-06/overview/html/overview_07.htm

Check out the very bottom for how various countries have handled the task of reducing governmental debt, also note that the US was doing quite well in the initial period, but seems to have started increasing the debt recently.

Oh and at the time Romania was a communist country, no matter what government policy would have been, I'm sure that it would have done with out regard to how it affects the population, which is unlike a democratic country

[Ben Sones]

FWIW, our national debt, in relation to our GDP, is not that bad compared to many other countries, and also not that bad compared to where it was in the aftermath of WW2. I'm too lazy to find a graph, but I'd imagine you can find the data if you do a good search for it.

That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that George W. Bush has borrowed more money during his time in office than all previous 42 presidents combined.

[SmokeyNecrosis]

The real problem is that other governments are not spending enough. They need to catch up so we are on parity. Damn foreign governments practicing fiscal responsibility!!! They better start packing on some debt themselves, before they decide that they are tired of funding the US debt.

Its not US citizens being up them there T-bills, and if you thens gots to worries about getting paid back in a deflated dollars paying a measely 5% interest rate, I would say you might be upside down at the end of the deal.

I say we invade and make em borrow more.

[Linoleum]

That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that George W. Bush has borrowed more money during his time in office than all previous 42 presidents combined.

By that yardstick the poorest person in Zimbabwe has more money than the western world combined.

[Brandon Clements]

Well, they certainly might have more folding cash. It still might not be enough to buy bread tomorrow.