17 Trillion Reasons to be Afraid

[TemplarKormac]

For the first time in US history, the national debt has topped $17 trillion, jumping almost $350 billion in a 24 hour time period. So what are the folks in Washington DC doing about it? Nothing. They raised the debt ceiling with no promise of addressing this issue in the near future. The proposed formation of a Budgetary Committee is no more than a knockoff of the "Super Committee" that was formed in 2011, which was a drastic failure. As Obama summarily rejected their findings. There are many reasons to be afraid that our President, Senators and Representatives in Washington do not care one bit about addressing our massive spending problem.

There are 17 trillion reasons why you should be afraid that we are heading down the road to fiscal and economic ruin, and that there's nobody willing to stop it.

The dollar amount isn't as important as is the percentage of the debt that number represents. That's true in much the same way that bragging about making four times as much as your father once did at your age isn't all that big of a deal if you're making $24,000 per year when the average income was $6,000 per year back in the early 1960s when that amount of money might actually have been worth more in terms of purchasing power.

To put matters in perspective, look at housing prices. Back in the 60's a member of my family bought a six bedroom house with a living room, a family room, a separate dining room, and 3 1/2 bathrooms plus alcoves and a separate laundry room for $35,000 which also included a two car garage, a large flagstone patio, a huge yard, and the whole side of the street which was a wooded area at the time. Now, admittedly it was a small town in an area that wasn't even near a large city, but $35,000 wouldn't even come close to buying a tiny home on a small lot in that town today.

The dollar amount is important, Mustang. Along with it, the debt is 105 (Thank you NoTea) percent of our GDP. I don't know what the rest of that was supposed to be, but, to put matters into perspective here, housing prices are soaring, and people are taking part in the same risky lending that caused the bubble to burst in 2008. Nobody learned any lessons from the Great Recession. Not Democrats, not Republicans, not Obama.

 

[Mustang]

Oh please.....Let's deal with facts. And one of the facts is that Obama got stuck with the bill for two wars on the 2009 books: $4,000,000,000,000* to be exact.

Here's the rundown of the debt since Reagan:


Size of gross debt -------- Federal account debt

Before Reagan $1 trillion $250 billion

Ronald Reagan $2.9 trillion $677 billion

George H.W. Bush $4 trillion $1 trillion

Bill Clinton $5.6 trillion $2.2 trillion

George W. Bush $10.6 trillion $4.3 trillion

Barack Obama $16.4 trillion* $4.9 trillion

While raw numbers are interesting, the more telling statistic is when debt is expressed as a percentage of the overall economy (gross domestic product). We’ve rounded the numbers to keep it simple.

Size of gross debt ----------- Federal account debt

Before Reagan 33 percent 7 percent

Ronald Reagan 53 percent 12.5 percent

George H.W. Bush 64 percent 16 percent

Bill Clinton 56.5 percent 24 percent

George W. Bush 77 percent 30 percent

Barack Obama 105 percent* 31 percent



Why is the national debt $16 trillion? - The Washington Post

I think a lot of people didn't understand exactly what Bush and Cheney were up to back a few years ago when Bush kept on submitting those "supplemental" spending bills to Congress to fund the war. The fact that they were supplemental spending bills meant that they were "off budget" and allowed them to spend the money without showing up as directly exploding the deficit and the debt.

With that said, President Obama stopped that process, and funding for the war was now an on-budget expenditure which automatically made the deficit and the debt appear larger than it previously was.

Oh brother. Just ignore the fact that Obama has outspent Bush by almost $700 billion. In 5 years.

Most of TARP, which was approved in the last few months of Bush's term, was spent after Obama came into office. The war funding continued under Obama on budget for a change. And since the economy tanked when Bush was president, that led to a decrease in tax receipts under Obama at the same time that transfer payments went up. So, quite naturally, the effects of the change in our nations fortunes didn't show up until Obama took office. But attributing that increase in spending and the loss of tax receipts which made the deficit and debt appear even worse to Obama is foolish because it wasn't a result of his policies.

But that doesn't mean that I don't understand why Republicans are blaming Obama by trying to lay the blame on his doorstep. I do understand. It's because they want to return to power. But anyone who's foolish enough to believe it's Obama's fault is a person who's being intentionally mislead by people whose primary agenda has nothing to do with solving the problem. Like I said, it's to discredit Obama so they can again come into power.

Therefore, the more important question to ask is what kind of policies would they put into place if they came back into power. And I think they would AGAIN embrace the very same policies that brought down the house in the first place. As Hall & Oates sang on their 1981 hit, "I can't go for that (no can do)."

 

[TemplarKormac]

I think a lot of people didn't understand exactly what Bush and Cheney were up to back a few years ago when Bush kept on submitting those "supplemental" spending bills to Congress to fund the war. The fact that they were supplemental spending bills meant that they were "off budget" and allowed them to spend the money without showing up as directly exploding the deficit and the debt.

With that said, President Obama stopped that process, and funding for the war was now an on-budget expenditure which automatically made the deficit and the debt appear larger than it previously was.

Oh brother. Just ignore the fact that Obama has outspent Bush by almost $700 billion. In 5 years.

Most of TARP, which was approved in the last few months of Bush's term, was spent after Obama came into office. The war funding continued under Obama on budget for a change. And since the economy tanked when Bush was president, that led to a decrease in tax receipts under Obama at the same time that transfer payments went up. So, quite naturally, the effects of the change in our nations fortunes didn't show up until Obama took office. But attributing that increase in spending and the loss of tax receipts which made the deficit and debt appear even worse to Obama is foolish because it wasn't a result of his policies.

But that doesn't mean that I don't understand why Republicans are blaming Obama by trying to lay the blame on his doorstep. I do understand. It's because they want to return to power. But anyone who's foolish enough to believe it's Obama's fault is a person who's being intentionally mislead by people whose primary agenda has nothing to do with solving the problem. Like I said, it's to discredit Obama so they can again come into power.

Therefore, the more important question to ask is what kind of policies would they put into place if they came back into power. And I think they would AGAIN embrace the very same policies that brought down the house in the first place. As Hall & Oates sang on their 1981 hit, "I can't go for that (no can do)."

It's anything but Obama's fault. You can't for the life of you accept that. He's had 5 years to correct this situation. He had the golden opportunity to do it when he had majorities in both houses. But instead of doing that, he chose to add more fuel to the fire with ObamaCare. When he inherits something that bad and doesn't do anything to mitigate it... then it becomes his problem and his mistake. His failure to correct this dilemma makes it his and and his alone.

Deal with it. You don't stand there in front of a burning building with the fire hose and watch it burn to the ground. You put the fire out.

 

[gallantwarrior]

For the first time in US history, the national debt has topped $17 trillion, jumping almost $350 billion in a 24 hour time period. So what are the folks in Washington DC doing about it? Nothing. They raised the debt ceiling with no promise of addressing this issue in the near future. The proposed formation of a Budgetary Committee is no more than a knockoff of the "Super Committee" that was formed in 2011, which was a drastic failure. As Obama summarily rejected their findings. There are many reasons to be afraid that our President, Senators and Representatives in Washington do not care one bit about addressing our massive spending problem.

There are 17 trillion reasons why you should be afraid that we are heading down the road to fiscal and economic ruin, and that there's nobody willing to stop it.

The dollar amount isn't as important as is the percentage of the debt that number represents. That's true in much the same way that bragging about making four times as much as your father once did at your age isn't all that big of a deal if you're making $24,000 per year when the average income was $6,000 per year back in the early 1960s when that amount of money might actually have been worth more in terms of purchasing power.

To put matters in perspective, look at housing prices. Back in the 60's a member of my family bought a six bedroom house with a living room, a family room, a separate dining room, and 3 1/2 bathrooms plus alcoves and a separate laundry room for $35,000 which also included a two car garage, a large flagstone patio, a huge yard, and the whole side of the street which was a wooded area at the time. Now, admittedly it was a small town in an area that wasn't even near a large city, but $35,000 wouldn't even come close to buying a tiny home on a small lot in that town today.

You cannot even build a decent barn for that kind of money nowadays.

 

[TemplarKormac]

For the first time in US history, the national debt has topped $17 trillion, jumping almost $350 billion in a 24 hour time period. So what are the folks in Washington DC doing about it? Nothing. They raised the debt ceiling with no promise of addressing this issue in the near future. The proposed formation of a Budgetary Committee is no more than a knockoff of the "Super Committee" that was formed in 2011, which was a drastic failure. As Obama summarily rejected their findings. There are many reasons to be afraid that our President, Senators and Representatives in Washington do not care one bit about addressing our massive spending problem.

There are 17 trillion reasons why you should be afraid that we are heading down the road to fiscal and economic ruin, and that there's nobody willing to stop it.

The dollar amount isn't as important as is the percentage of the debt that number represents. That's true in much the same way that bragging about making four times as much as your father once did at your age isn't all that big of a deal if you're making $24,000 per year when the average income was $6,000 per year back in the early 1960s when that amount of money might actually have been worth more in terms of purchasing power.

To put matters in perspective, look at housing prices. Back in the 60's a member of my family bought a six bedroom house with a living room, a family room, a separate dining room, and 3 1/2 bathrooms plus alcoves and a separate laundry room for $35,000 which also included a two car garage, a large flagstone patio, a huge yard, and the whole side of the street which was a wooded area at the time. Now, admittedly it was a small town in an area that wasn't even near a large city, but $35,000 wouldn't even come close to buying a tiny home on a small lot in that town today.

You cannot even build a decent barn for that kind of money nowadays.

Mustang is skirting around the fact that the value of the dollar has decreased in the past five years faster than at any other point in history. Increased spending and printing money further devalues the dollar. At some point, $35,000 bucks won't even buy you a decent set of clothes.

 

[gallantwarrior]

The dollar amount isn't as important as is the percentage of the debt that number represents. That's true in much the same way that bragging about making four times as much as your father once did at your age isn't all that big of a deal if you're making $24,000 per year when the average income was $6,000 per year back in the early 1960s when that amount of money might actually have been worth more in terms of purchasing power.

To put matters in perspective, look at housing prices. Back in the 60's a member of my family bought a six bedroom house with a living room, a family room, a separate dining room, and 3 1/2 bathrooms plus alcoves and a separate laundry room for $35,000 which also included a two car garage, a large flagstone patio, a huge yard, and the whole side of the street which was a wooded area at the time. Now, admittedly it was a small town in an area that wasn't even near a large city, but $35,000 wouldn't even come close to buying a tiny home on a small lot in that town today.

You cannot even build a decent barn for that kind of money nowadays.

Mustang is skirting around the fact that the value of the dollar has decreased in the past five years faster than at any other point in history. Increased spending and printing money further devalues the dollar. At some point, $35,000 bucks won't even buy you a decent set of clothes.

Whoo, tell me about how much less my dollar is worth now. I used to fill my gas tank for about $75, and that was a significant increase over what I paid when I started driving. Now, I am privileged to cough up $120 for a tank of gas. Groceries? My Mom used to feed a family of 10 for around $200/month. $200/month...well, it feeds me (a single) for maybe two weeks, if I shop carefully, don't buy brand name goods, and forage for leftovers from the airplanes I work on.

 

[LoneLaugher]

This is a simpleton argument. The OP should avoid Stuart Varmey at all costs.

The Presudent has been fiscally responsible when compared to his predecessor.

http://useconomy.about.com/od/usdebtanddeficit/p/US-Debt-by-President.htm

 

[percysunshine]

Well, eventually somebody was going to do it. Enjoy....



Hitler Learns About the Obamacare Exchanges | Power Line


.

 

[gallantwarrior]

This is a simpleton argument. The OP should avoid Stuart Varmey at all costs.

The Presudent has been fiscally responsible when compared to his predecessor.

Two wrongs don't make a right. If G. Bush jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, then Obama should also?

 

[Contumacious]

But anyone who's foolish enough to believe it's Obama's fault is a person who's being intentionally mislead by people whose primary agenda has nothing to do with solving the problem. Like I said, it's to discredit Obama so they can again come into power. ."

We concur. The 2008 depression was not Obama's fault.

But he is a politician as bad as Bush.

He manages the depression by incurring more debt and inflating the currency. In addition to that, Obama hellcare will add 2 billion to the national debt.

SO while is not responsible for causing it ; he is definitely responsible for prolonging it.

/

 

[LoneLaugher]

This is a simpleton argument. The OP should avoid Stuart Varmey at all costs.

The Presudent has been fiscally responsible when compared to his predecessor.

Two wrongs don't make a right. If G. Bush jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, then Obama should also?

Obama is turning the ship. Pay attention. The deficit is smaller. And that is WITH PUTTING THE WARS ON THE BOOKS!!!!!!

Pay attention.

 

[TemplarKormac]

You cannot even build a decent barn for that kind of money nowadays.

Mustang is skirting around the fact that the value of the dollar has decreased in the past five years faster than at any other point in history. Increased spending and printing money further devalues the dollar. At some point, $35,000 bucks won't even buy you a decent set of clothes.

Whoo, tell me about how much less my dollar is worth now. I used to fill my gas tank for about $75, and that was a significant increase over what I paid when I started driving. Now, I am privileged to cough up $120 for a tank of gas. Groceries? My Mom used to feed a family of 10 for around $200/month. $200/month...well, it feeds me (a single) for maybe two weeks, if I shop carefully, don't buy brand name goods, and forage for leftovers from the airplanes I work on.

Exactly! One of our dollars equals 20 1912 dollars.

Inflation Calculator | Find US Dollar's Value from 1913-2013

 

[Katzndogz]

The goal of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to bankrupt the United States into socialism. It's working just as it was intended to.

 

[LoneLaugher]

The goal of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to bankrupt the United States into socialism. It's working just as it was intended to.

Link?

 

[gallantwarrior]

This is a simpleton argument. The OP should avoid Stuart Varmey at all costs.

The Presudent has been fiscally responsible when compared to his predecessor.

Two wrongs don't make a right. If G. Bush jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, then Obama should also?

Obama is turning the ship. Pay attention. The deficit is smaller. And that is WITH PUTTING THE WARS ON THE BOOKS!!!!!!

Pay attention.

You need not fear, I am definitely paying attention.

 

[gallantwarrior]

Mustang is skirting around the fact that the value of the dollar has decreased in the past five years faster than at any other point in history. Increased spending and printing money further devalues the dollar. At some point, $35,000 bucks won't even buy you a decent set of clothes.

Whoo, tell me about how much less my dollar is worth now. I used to fill my gas tank for about $75, and that was a significant increase over what I paid when I started driving. Now, I am privileged to cough up $120 for a tank of gas. Groceries? My Mom used to feed a family of 10 for around $200/month. $200/month...well, it feeds me (a single) for maybe two weeks, if I shop carefully, don't buy brand name goods, and forage for leftovers from the airplanes I work on.

Exactly! One of our dollars equals 20 1912 dollars.

Inflation Calculator | Find US Dollar's Value from 1913-2013

We are fortunate that most of our customers prefer not to waste food. It's been paid for and many of them also take food from the airplanes home. Of course, we have to be aware of FDA rules regarding food coming from overseas. I don't object, there can be some pretty nasty bugs hiding in foreign imports. It still hurts to see how much food it simply sent to the incinerators, though.
Mechanics will eat pretty much anything that doesn't move faster than we do...

 

[percysunshine]

The goal of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to bankrupt the United States into socialism. It's working just as it was intended to.

Link?

 

[Jackson]

For the first time in US history, the national debt has topped $17 trillion, jumping almost $350 billion in a 24 hour time period. So what are the folks in Washington DC doing about it? Nothing. t.

It is not their job to do anything about the national debt.

We just elect them to office for 4 to 8 years.

We the members of the Parasitic faction give them power and they will feed us , provide health insurance and make us happy. We have no time to worry about the national debt.

Only Taxpayers and the Tea Partyers worry about that crap.

.

Somebody had better worry about this crap and if it isn't our representatives, then we should replaces them. I want to hear from my representatives ideas to bring this deficit down.

I want to hear about spending cuts. I would bet there are thousands of programs that are either ineffective or duplicative. There are pork barrel projects we don't need.

Each district should get a list of federal programs and have them listed in the newspaper and online. Include a brief description of each. Have the people select which ones the think are probably ineffective, outdated or duplicative. Write their congressman and he will ten select the top 15 programs or projects that should be investigated by CAGW (Citizens Against Government Waste) or CBO (Congressional Budget Office.

Then in turn each representative should present to the House at least $2,000,000 in cuts from their district, but for their country.

 

[rdean]

Two unfunded wars

trillions in tax cuts

military spending equal to the rest of the world combined

drugs for votes bill costing trillions

millions of jobs moved to China from 2001 to 2008

tens of thousands of factories closed

the cost of paying for tens of thousands of young Americans maimed for life in Iraq

a third of the nation's largest businesses pay zero in taxes

billionaires moving their money overseas to protect it from the country

Gee, I wonder where all this debt is coming from?

I know, let's cut food stamps, make sure no one has health care and slash Medicare and Social Security. That should "fix" things.

 

[Katzndogz]

The goal of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to bankrupt the United States into socialism. It's working just as it was intended to.

Link?

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their [sic] own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.

The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level."

Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act. This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements -- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown -- providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.

[ame=http://askville.amazon.com/Cloward-Piven-Strategy-Orchestrated-Crisis/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=55387457]What is the Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis?[/ame]

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven (both longtime members of theDemocratic Socialists of America, where Piven today is an honorary chair), the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.

Collapsing the System ? on Purpose