“The government is going to reduce its so-called "discretionary" spending by a grand total of $200 billion. Only about $1.4 trillion of the government's $3.8 trillion budget is discretionary. The rest is legally required, thanks to unfunded entitlement programs, like Medicare. So right now, far less than half of the government's annual budget can legally be restrained. Meanwhile, there's no accurate tally of the government's debt. Supposedly, we owe around $12 trillion. This number is so large that it is meaningless. …technically, you could say there are basically 100 million taxpayers in the United States. Dividing the total debt ($12 trillion) by the number of taxpayers, you can see our total debt is actually $120,000 per taxpayer. How many people do you know can afford an additional $120,000 in debt?
And the truth is, the $12 trillion figure is only a down payment on our actual debts. For example, nobody really knows how much more money Fannie and Freddie will require. (My bet is $500 billion each - or $1 trillion.) On Christmas Eve, when no one was looking, Congress approved unlimited funding for the two national mortgage banks. (ED. note: yet MORE of fraud Obama’s “transparency”… sneaking through a massive budget change Christmas eve! How clever… and how LEFTIST!)
And that's far from the only "off-budget" item. We have committed to fighting two civil wars - in Iraq and Afghanistan. The costs are likely to be $50 billion or so next year alone. How much over the next 10 years? Maybe $1 trillion? Or maybe more. And there's a new "jobs package" that's estimated to cost $76 billion next year with another $25 billion to bail out cash-strapped state governments. Even if you only looked at the dollar amounts that have been budgeted today and you ignored all of the rest of the growth of future entitlement spending, you'll discover that we actually owe something around $20 trillion right now.
And if $20 trillion is the real number, then the amount owed by taxpayers is actually $200,000 each. Of course, that's if you're counting all of the taxpayers. Most people, though, pay almost nothing in taxes. Unless you're earning more than $50,000 per year, you're not really contributing to the tax receipts. Roughly 50 million folks are in this category. These people pay less than 10% of all income tax receipts. So you shouldn't count on them to repay much, if any, of these debts - they can't.
What's the real per-capita number? My best estimate - just on the money we actually owe today - is $400,000 per taxpayer. At a reasonable (6%) rate of interest that's $24,000 each - just to pay the interest on these debts each year. How many people do you know that could afford $24,000 a year in higher taxes? How many people can afford additional debts of $400,000?”
Cited from Porter Stansberry, What you must know about bankruptcy of the United States, 2 Feb., from the Daily Crux
Personal note: You know the limousine/Learjet liberals won’t be hurt – it is ALWAYS THE POOR that get hurt the worst when a country goes bankrupt. Thus, as always, socialism is the LEAST compassionate of systems in the end. THAT is why I resist it.
Jim Vanne
