Click pic to embiggen and see additional comparisons
$114,500,000,000,000. – US unfunded liabilities
To the left you can see the pillar of cold hard $100 bills that dwarfs the WTC & Empire State Building – both at one point world’s tallest buildings. If you look carefully you can see the Statue of Liberty.The 114.5 Trillion dollar super skyscraper is the amount of money the U.S. Government knows it does not have to fully fund the medicare program, medicare prescription drug program, social security, military and civil servant pensions. It is the money USA knows it will not have to pay all its bills.
The unfunded liability is calculated on current tax and funding inputs, and future demographic shifts in US Population.
Should we become more like Brazil?
Derek, stop talking to Bobbo.
He calls you a dunce, but he is a complete blithering idiot.
He is such a sycophant that he cannot comprehend these very, very simple facts:
“credit-rating agencies that helped to create the financial crisis that led to a deep recession are now warning that the U.S. could lose the AAA rating it has had since 1917. The real culprit is the U.S. political class, especially the President who has presided over this historic collapse of fiscal credibility.
Then came the Obama blowout, in league with Nancy Pelosi’s Congress. With the recession as a rationale, Democrats consciously blew up the national balance sheet, lifting federal outlays to 25% in 2009, the highest level since 1945.
in the U.S. political system, Presidents are supposed to be the fiscal adults. When they abdicate, the teenagers invite over their special interest friends and blow the inheritance.
Even if this debt-ceiling crisis passes, the threat of a credit downgrade will continue and grow until Mr. Obama changes his policies, or Americans change Presidents.”
This is a GREAT article, with correct figures and graphs which illustrates the true villain in our financial crisis.
Absolutely everything Bobbo said here is fundamentally wrong coated in obscuring blather to hide the fact that he really doesn’t comprehend the real issues.
Then he wastes everyone’s time pontificating endless hot air. He is seriously not worth the effort.
Read the article and then reread Bobbo’s postings. It will show in grand detail just how much an idiot he is. Also a deep and disturbing degree of psychosis.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304203304576446332084493902.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Be grateful you’re not a Bobbo.
There’s an old saying. “If you owe the bank $100 you have a problem. If you owe the bank $100,000,000 the bank has a problem. In the case of the United States government, the bank is China.
We just might find out how true this is before long. Funny thing is that back in the Bush years and the first few months of Obama, I kept trying to tell everyone that the mounting debt will catch up with us one of these days, and asking what the hell we were going to do then. Nobody wanted to answer, so I finally stopped asking.
Same thing happened with housing prices. As the price of housing kept shooting up, I was asking, how is anyone able to afford these houses? Nobody wanted to answer, so I stopped asking. But of course, the answer was, “They couldn’t.”
#24–RabidBoffo==Have you ever heard the saying its ok to talk to yourself but you shouldn’t argue? Thats one terrible virus if your computers take on different personalities. I’ve posted from 3 different computers. I haven’t noticed them have different personalities.
I do note the appeal of having several different aspects of your self captured/monikered when posting here. I do that with my bobbo extended. If you use it that way, your chosen/crafted name can help direct your thoughts, or more importantly here, the wrapping your thoughts come in.
But to your point, you do miss it by only a little bit. There IS black and white, but there is gray as well. Telling which continuum you are in can be quite helpful in seeing the issues more clearly. Most issues should be gray as we approach them, but as they are studied, colors may be perceived–not always. some are color blind. Others see the colors but are too stupid to give them names.
Life is like that. Complex, yet often simple. Error is made when turning one into the other.
I’ve posted repeatedly we are ALL silly hoomans, that I see myself in every criticism I make==just as we all should. But I see the colors and the gray.
We should all have long labels, the longer the better until they become a gray mass of bright colors.
Yea, verily.
#28–Thomas==is it better to figure out the rules and not follow them or to just go blindly forth? Yes, its difficult to save during good times, but its good to know we would be better off if we did. Some countries/States/individuals have done that from time to time and when bad times came, they were better prepared.
But its good to know the other half as well–that in bad times, the government should spend/borrow/deficit spend to lessen the damage.
When you know what the right policy is, we then know exactly how our elected officials are on the take otherwise.
surely, this is a good thing?
tcc3–my link above shows the USA debt. You can pick your own GDP and do the comparison. Statements can be shady or just confused or even wrong. So many ways to express the same concern.
#32–Ah Yea==springing to Dereks defense? Why don’t you tell him only a dunce analyzes international relationships using the terms of personal relationships?
But the hour did make me sloppy–the “sincerely” was meant to communicate that I had Derek’s best interests, his edumacation, at heart. But I missed my mark.
Is that grounds not to even talk to me? Horrors!!! Why not martial a better argument and beat me at my own game? Wouldn’t that be better Ah Yea? Why don’t YOU do that?–Show Derek the way.
You are rather a dunce yourself. So many silly statements and when confronted you come up with nothing but personal insults and general denials. Not insightful/helpful/argumentative at all. You can do better. You’ve gotten very lazy. Still providing links which is a good thing but you only half represent them correctly in practice and when challenged on their meaning–you fold like a three card Monte player.
You can do better and you should. Derek an unknown quantity, but we wish him the best.
#33–spsffan==thats it. Thanks. You aren’t being fair with yourself. Most of the answer can be found in the correct question. The Iron Fist of economics is finally about bills having to be paid in only a few ways===profits to make payment, devaluation of the currency discounting the debt, war. I don’t see profits from a stronger economy happening in our society. I do see devaluation which hurts anyone with currency based assets–that being the Chinese and American savers. War is not likely as it also has negative financial consequences although it is often viewed as a mix.
Yep, the “Big World Wide Crash” is ticking along. I can see a crash in currency value creating domestic revolutions in China. don’t know/guess about India. America will turn to TV.
Real politik.
#32–Ah Yea==good link. You do know the chart is just a chart and doens’t “prove” anything? If I built a bomb and set it to ticking and then put it in your car and you drive away as fast as possible to get the car into the country instead of leaving it in the crowded city and the bomb goes off==who is responsible for the deaths? You like to insanely partisanly blame Obama, but everyone knows it is the responsibility of those who built the bomb. Thats enough spoon fed sugar for now.
To your article, I’ve read the first paragraph. Enough even there to stop and parse:
“So the credit-rating agencies that helped to create the financial crisis that led to a deep recession /// How did they help create the financial crisis if its all Obama’s fault?
are now warning that the U.S. could lose the AAA rating it has had since 1917. /// Yes, that is there job. Whats the point except that an entity dedicated to assessing risk and consequences is FINALLY doing their job?
As painfully ironic as this is, /// Ironic? Again that goes to Obama’s blame more than anything else. Failure to warn about what someone else is actively doing is quite farther down the list for agents of causation. But irony….I quibble.
there’s no benefit in shooting the messengers. /// Just the very opposite.
The real culprit is the U.S. political class, /// No. Its WallStreet as the most culpable. Corrupt politicians come in below depending on how you like to parse.
especially the President who has presided over this historic collapse of fiscal credibility. //// Ha, ha. WHEN did the collapse start? How were the rating agencies involved? Sadly Ah Yea==this article shoots your argument in the foot in its first paragraph. I’ll read the rest just to see how otherwise intelligent people such as yourself are turned into stooges.
Like taking candy from a baby.
So, PedoBreath==I assume some of those numbers are responding to my posts? But why stop at #23? Does that mean you agree with what I post thereafter?
On your next review, could you provide just a little bit more detail? Telling me I’m a sheeple doesn’t really tell me how I’m wrong.
Surely, sheeple or not, we are all here to maximize our personal potential. Would you agree with that Pedo?
Vote Democrat and hasten the end of this corrupt country.
FactsOn/FactsOff–are you for spending cuts ONLY or the combo plate? Which do you think will end this corrupt country sooner?
#6, Bobbo, “No country has ever followed Keynes.”
Very few people can understand Keynes, which is why people like Hicks and Samuelson had to come in behind and fill in all the blanks. a good bit of what people call “Keynesian economics” was developed by others.
#11, “The failure of Keynesian Economic “Theory” then is that no one repays the debts when good times return.”
Economics and Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan’s book “Democracy in Deficit” focuses primarily on this topic: How Keynesian intervention through deficit spending is politically popular with the electorate, so western politicians have had very little incentive to live within their means and pay back past debts.
The truth is that the government will need to issue more debt in the short term, and we will also need to cut spending AND raise taxes to deal with the debt in the long term. But everybody will need to feel pain, not just saying that the rich few can pay the bills and everybody else gets to continue on a usual. The majority getting a free ride on the backs of future taxpayers is what has gotten us into this mess in the first place.
#45 “…not just saying that the rich few can pay the bills and everybody else gets to continue on a usual.”
Watch out, you might be branded a heretic for making sense. The idea of tax the rich as an answer to all of our problems is a popular red herring.
Which is the bigger herring:
The solution is to:
A: Tax the Rich.
or
B: Reduce taxes on the Rich.
NO ONE says taxing the rich is the solution except shilling PUKES who want to spin the issue. The solution “thoughtful” people recognize is to reduce expenses while increasing taxes.
Brain dead morons need not hurt themselves trying to figure out where the money is.
Obombastic says that 80% of Americans want a tax hike. If that was true the Repubs would be falling over themselves to pass one. Instead they keep being told ‘No more taxes or YOU are out!’ ‘Balance the budget or go home!’
Of course nobody voted for the budget he sent to Congress either which had to at least tie the record for least supported budget of all time. This guy is a true long legged mac daddy that can really spread the BS but he can’t walk the walk.
What this nut case isn’t getting is the word is drifting that even if they up the limit on borrowing the lenders are no longer happy. They are starting to see the obvious. Somebody is going to get stuck with bad debt and the AAA lending rate is going to go away. Interest rates paid on the debt will start to soar! Once that happens our credit is on a slick road heading for junk bond status already hit by at least one member of the EU combined with a probable wild rate of inflation exceeding the glory days of Jimmy Carter.
Obama change you can believe in. I just wish the destination had less in common with my vision of hell.
“Obombastic says that 80% of Americans want a tax hike.”
Now if you asked that same 80% if they still supported a tax hike for them, what would their answer be? With the current discussion focused on taxing Richie Rich, it’s not surprising everybody else is in favor. Love me some democracy.
Public opinion polls are rarely useful in determining what is good policy.
#48–do-ill==your vision of hell? Haw! Haw!! If its that bad, you should go to your favorite proctologist and use your Preferred Customer Card to get a discount on a Colonoscopy. I’m sure you’ve got a few polyps clouding your vision.
What is it about “No new taxes” “No closing loopholes without an offsetting tax cut” or “We have a spending problem, not a tax problem” or “3 Trillion in Social Welfare Spending cuts for 1 Trillion in increased tax revenues” do you look at as support for the notion PUKES are “for” tax increases.
Silly to lie when the evidence is right in our face right now. You are supposed to wait at least one week before you gin up the big lie to cover your tracks.
Stupid Puke.
From Ah Yea’s link which is a good read on the Pukes Obamania, and is only 5-6 paragraphs long:
“Congress is responsible for the way so much of this spending was wasted, resulting in little job creation and the slowest economic recovery since the 1930s. But in the U.S. political system, Presidents are supposed to be the fiscal adults. When they abdicate, the teenagers invite over their special interest friends and blow the inheritance.”
Parsing:
Congress is responsible for the way so much of this spending was wasted, /// Congress. YES CONGRESS–not Obama. The spending was 1/3 job stimulus, 1/3 Pork, and 1/3 Tax Cuts. Pure Congressional corruption. The entirety needed to be spent on jobs==as in rebuilding infrastructure or green energy.
resulting in little job creation and the slowest economic recovery since the 1930s. /// Correct.
But in the U.S. political system, Presidents are supposed to be the fiscal adults. /// BS—PUKES (ie==the Congress that forced this so called stimulus package by holding america hostage to favor their special interests) cannot avoid their own perfidy by saying they can be idiots/corrupt and the President is supposed to stop them. Jeeze!
When they abdicate, the teenagers invite over their special interest friends and blow the inheritance. /// Yes–watch the PUKES doing it now.
Yes Ah Yea===quite the condemnation of Obama.
Ha, ha. What a dolt.
Pedro?
#47
I said it before, look at the The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 for a great example of a prior scheme to deal with the deficit. It included a tax on “luxury items” that was a big success (sarcasm off). It even had provisions for an alternative to Social Security. Bush 1 sure shot himself in the foot with that one.
#54–Mextli==your point whether true or not is not responsive. Connect your own dots.
The illustration is incredibly misleading. On purpose. With malice aforethought.
The bills are on pallets. With a generous space between them. And they don’t even cover the pallet surface. Each pallet consumes nearly double the volume that the bills in question represent. You know, for conceptual accuracy. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
If you look at the tallest stack, its base is square, and its top is a generously non-square rectangle. No computer rendering made this mistake. It was the hand of an artist who had an ax to grind.
Let’s do it right:
A stack of $100 bills, 100 thick is 0.43 by 2.61 by 6.14-inch. Footprint: 16.03 square inches by 0.0358 feet tall. That’s about 1/28th of a foot tall.
Thickness is defined to four decimal places at 0.0043 inches or 0.010922cm. Each bill weighs about one gram. The stack weighs one hundred grams or 0.220 pounds. And it is worth $10,000.00.
One trillion dollars worth is one hundred million of those stacks.
If you papered a footprint of one acre—the footprint of each World Trade Tower, and the approximate footprint of the “to scale” illustration as gauged by the base of the tower—with these, it would cover 43,560 square feet or 6,272,640 square inches. Each less-than-a-half-inch layer would consume 3.913 billion dollars.
Using that as a guide, every vertical foot of paper would house 27.91 layers and be worth $109,221,830,000, roughly.
>>>>>>>The $114.5 trillion dollar figure would involve 1048 feet of these one-hundred-nine-billion-dollar one-foot layers.<<<<<<<
Ahem.
About the height of three quarters of one World Trade Center Tower. Those were about 1365 feet tall, on average, says Wikipedia, street to roof.
So the people making the original illustration were providing their example with a helluva lot of fluff, just to jerk you around.
Nice picture, though. Just exceptionally and intentionally misleading. You can space out stacks of bills of any denomination as widely as you wish to prove all sorts of bs. How many pennies in a stack from here to Uranus? Get a laugh. Read that one aloud.
I’m betting that the artist is a Republican.
Cut the military budget by 50%, cancel civilian contracts, dismantle the military industrial complex. Get out of wars….every wounded veteran you create costs the taxpayer thousands in medical treatment.
Eliminate the Federal Reserve, move the money ownership back to the US Treasury.
These 2 changes alone save 1.3 Trillion dollars, with more savings down the road yearly.
The Chi-Coms are willing to let us work off part of the debt:
http://theonion.com/articles/china-agrees-to-erase-portion-of-us-debt-if-americ,20913/
#56 BuzzMega – Thank you for analyzing what I only suspected. The language is very suspect as well. Lots of weasel words and vaguely defined terms.
“I am now a Keynesian in economics” — Richard M. Nixon
http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/062110a.html
Today is the long run classical economists warned us about.
Bobbo believes in Keynesian Economics.
Enough said.
I’ve been paying Social Security premiums for DECADES — since I was 15 — but it still gets demonized as an “unfunded mandate.”
What thu??!?!
Somebody–I was going to state that I don’t believe in “anything” economics. I find the subject too dismal. That said, on quiet reflection—yes, I do believe in Keynesian economic theory. “All” the experts do. They receive Novel Prizes for it. Is my life experience having nothing to do with Economics an equal measure against this expertise?
I don’t think so.
somebody may disagree, but who are these people? Do they “know” anything? Any qualifications? Or just shills, dopes, and retards?
I take it on faith: spend in bad times, save in good times. Hmmmm–can this “work” in a downward spiral? Does “anything” work in a downward spiral? Somebody help me?
Ha, ha.