Saturday 01-14-12

Numbers Game: 34 Shocking Facts about U.S. Debt

http://oddhammer.com/tutorials/debt_clock/

Recently I came across an arresting set of numbers published in the Economic Collapse Blog, a blog new to me and worth considering.

Thirty years ago the U.S. debt was a crisis out of control. Now that debt is 15 times larger and government is adding over a trillion dollars to the debt every year. The facts below should concern every American and should be shared with as many people as possible.

These numbers show that American “prosperity” is an illusion purchased by the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world. We are a nation addicted to debt and the debt crisis threatens to destroy us. Here are some of those numbers:

#1 In fiscal year 2011, the U.S. government spent 3.7 trillion dollars but only brought in 2.4 trillion dollars.

#2 When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the U.S. national debt was less than 1 trillion dollars. Today, the U.S. national debt is over 15.2 trillion dollars.

#3 In 2011 U.S. debt surpassed 100 percent of GDP for the first time ever.

#4 According to Wikipedia, the monetary base “consists of coins, paper money (both as bank vault cash and as currency circulating in the public), and commercial banks’ reserves with the central bank.” Currently the U.S. monetary base is around 2.7 trillion dollars. The total of that money would only make a small dent in our national debt.

#5 The U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt during fiscal 2011.

#6 The U.S. government has total assets of 2.7 trillion dollars and has total liabilities of 17.5 trillion dollars. The liabilities do not even count 4.7 trillion dollars of intra-governmental debt that is currently outstanding.

#7 During the 3 years of Obama administration the U.S. government accumulated more total debt than it did from 1789 when George Washington took office to 1993 when Bill Clinton took office.

#8 The U.S. national debt will surpass 23 trillion dollars in 2015.

#9 According to the GAO, the U.S. government is facing 34 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities for social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare. These are committed obligations for which there are no money.

#10 Some estimate that the unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government now total over 117 trillion dollars.

#11 According to the GAO, the ratio of debt held by the public to GDP is projected to reach 287 percent of GDP by 2086.

#12 A recent IMF policy paper entitled “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.

#13 The United States government is responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.

#14 When the national debt is divided equally among all U.S. taxpayers each taxpayer owes approximately $134,685.

#15 Mandatory federal spending surpassed total federal revenue for the first time ever in fiscal 2011. That was not supposed to happen until 50 years from now.

#16 During the period 2007- 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26% but the U.S. national debt soared by 61%.

#17 During Barack Obama’s first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.

#18 All spending by federal, state and local governments, equals 46.6% of GDP.

#19 People are addicted to government checks. In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income. Today, government transfer payments account for 18.4% of all income.

#20 U.S. households are now receiving more money directly from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.

#21 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits. In 1983, that number was below 30 percent.

#22 In 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.

#23 In 1950, each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 U.S. workers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are now only 1.75 full-time private sector workers for each person that is receiving Social Security benefits.

#24 The U.S. government now says that the Medicare trust fund will run out five years faster than they were projecting in 2011.

#25 Spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP. In 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.

#26 If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (as do all publicly-traded corporations) the U.S. government budget deficit would be about $4 trillion to $5 trillion every year.

#27 If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since, you would not have spent one trillion dollars by now. In 2012 the U.S. government is going to add more than a trillion dollars to the national debt.

#28 If you started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#29 A trillion $10 bills, if they were taped end to end, would wrap around the globe more than 380 times. That amount would still not be enough to pay off the U.S. national debt.

#30 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 470,000 years to pay off the national debt.

#31 If Bill Gates gave every penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

#32 According to Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, the U.S. is facing a “fiscal gap” of over 200 trillion dollars in the future. He wrote for CNN….

The government’s total indebtedness – its fiscal gap – now stands at $211 trillion, by my arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the difference, measured in present value, between all projected future spending obligations – including our huge defense expenditures and massive entitlement programs, as well as making interest and principal payments on the official debt – and all projected future taxes.

#33 Add up all forms of debt in the United States (government, business and consumer), and it totals more than 56 trillion dollars, more than $683,000 per family. The average savings per U.S. family is only about $4,735.

#34 The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve System was created in 1913.

But do our leaders care about statistics such as these?

No. In fact, Barack Obama says that we need to raise the debt limit by another 1.2 trillion dollars.

The absurdity of raising the debt limit when we are already in so much debt is illustrated by this video. The “huge cuts” that Congress has agreed to are meaningless when compared to how rapidly our debt is exploding.

It is not just U.S. debt that is a problem. The European debt crisis threatens to unravel in 2012 and Japan actually has the highest debt to GDP ratio in the entire industrialized world.

In 2012, a total of 7,600,000,000,000 dollars of debt must be rolled over by the G-7 nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China. That doesn’t even count new borrowing. That number just represents old debts that are coming due that must be refinanced.

The Economic Collapse Blog suggests, and I agree: “Your future and the future of your children and grandchildren has been destroyed. You better take action while you still can.”

http://sovereign-investor.com/2012/01/11/numbers-game-shocking-facts-about-u-s-debt/