Quote:
Originally Posted by Nebe
Each one of us owes around $50,000 if we all had to pay off the national debt.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
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Nebe, it would be about $50k each to pay off the national debt, which is around $17 trilliion. But that number excludes the unfunded liabilities to Medicare and Sociual Security, which are at least another $50 trillion. Raven says the total debt, including those entitlement programs, is around $82 trillion. If we use that number, every single living American owes $273,333 (assuming there are 300 million Americans).
Think about that for a second. At our current tax and spending levels, we have overspent by more than a quarter million dollars for each one of us. Every family of 4 owes another $1.1 million, in addition to what they currently pay in taxes.
When someone like Paul Ryan says "we can't afford this", those on Spence's side make a commercial showing Ryan pushing a wheelchair-bound old lady off a cliff. The imnplication is clear. If you don't think that we should continue this deficit spending, liberals will say you hate old people and poor people.
That's where American politics is. In 15-20 years, the entitlements will collapse the economy in a way that makes 2008 look like the roaring 1920's. When that happens, most people will realize that Paul Ryan was correct, and that the liberals were full of it. It will cause the moderate folks, the ones who are somehow still on the fence, to reject liberalism. Even Spence will have a hard time saying with a staright face that Obama was right and Paul Ryan was wrong...
THis was the easiest problem in the world to solve. Economists have been saying since 1960, that the Baby Boomers would bankrupt Social Security and Medicare. It's like a slow-moving train that's been coming at us for 50 years, and we didn't have the political will to step off the tracks. Had we addressed the probblem back then,m it would have been a mild fix. Not now. Witness what happened in Central Falls, Rhode Island, which went broke, and had to cut pension payments to current retirees by 50 percent.
That storm is coming, it is a mathematical certainty. Today, liberalks are rejecting the principles of elementary school arithmetic. This is not higher order calculus, it is 4th grade arithmetic. And the liberals reject the notion that overspending by $250k per person, is un-sustainable.
Historically, both parties share the blame. Today, only one side denies the reality.
Spence, your response? That "some debt is expected and OK"? That we can just print off another $80 trillion in new money and give it to China?