Saturday, February 05, 2011

Uh-Oh II

From DailyWealth.com:

Our national debt has doubled since 2005.

We've borrowed more money in the last five years than we had in the entire history of our government until then.

This isn't sustainable. The government's annual deficits now routinely surpass $1 trillion.

The first $1 trillion deficit came in 2008 – and the government explained it away as the consequence of the financial crisis. But we racked up another $1 trillion deficit in 2009 and yet another in 2010. We'll have another in 2011 and so on.

The government cannot increase tax revenues enough to cover our spending or repay our debts – ever.

Our annual deficits have become completely unlinked to taxes. Total federal income taxes and corporate taxes generate $1.1 trillion a year in revenue, and we still ran a $1.3 trillion federal deficit last year. So even if we increased tax revenues by 100%, we would still have fallen $200 million short. This is totally unsustainable.

We can't repay our debts.

Total debt outstanding in the U.S. currently exceeds $55 trillion. That's $681,165 in debt per U.S. family. There is simply no way to repay (or even maintain) debt of this magnitude using the income of the average American family, which is slightly less than $50,000 per family per year. Interest alone on these debts (based on a 5% rate) would total $34,000 per family every year. Total debt in the U.S. economy is unsustainable and can't be financed without printing vast new sums of money.

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