U.S. Digs Deeper Into Debt

I’m sorry but isn’t this GOOD NEWS? At least for Obama’s primary backers the big, international banks and billionaires. Forgive but I thought the whole idea was to bankrupt the USA, and its people. And then to “bail out” only the banks, hedgefunds, etc that are owned by Obama’s backers and consolidate power into the Federal (and later international) government’s hands. Why else is Obama encouraging people to go into more personal debt (cash for clunkers)? Debt has been used for centuries to enslave people. In the old days at least they were more honest and had “debtor’s prisons” and “indenured servants”. Or it was only used against the “3rd World” via IMF/WB loans and then forced regime changes and “austerity measures”. Now they just buy up the country, fund the politicians, and nationalize anything they wish.

Forgot to mention that the Chinese LAUGHED in Geithner’s face when he started with the Obama double speak. The spending has to stop! Are the american people so stupid that they have sold their children’s future for a bumper sticker slogan.

The budget mess falls on pretty much everyone. The citizens and the government have overspent. Fault falls on both parties and the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, and this has been going on for decades, especially since the middle years of the Carter administration. We get the government we deserve. Thanks Carter for your doctrine of controlling the Middle East for oil. Thanks Reagan for the expensive arms buildup against the Soviets. Thanks Clinton for sending jobs oversees and our exploding trade imbalances. Thanks Bush for silly wars and the growth of government. Thanks Obama for stepping on the gas. True thanks to Ron Paul for trying to stop the fiscal madness for the last couple of decades.

Under GW Bush, tax revenues grew each year until the housing/finance collapse of 2008. The deficit shrank each year until 2008. But spending grew quickly as well.
Answer: Control the spending–don’t raise taxes.

Why’d my post about Weimer Germany get deleted? It was not only informational but witty! I mentioned German impressionism and those cool dogs.
I’m just going to say this: If you can talk about German Impressionism and have a weimaraner, you’re gold with the ladies.

Mike in Costa Mesa:”The “stimulus” is an enormous waste of taxpayer money. Think of the economy as a lake. ”
Or you can think of the economy like a, I don’t know, economy where the best way to avert a depression is temporarily increase government spending. But that’s just based on reality and decades of hard data, not a simplistic metaphor.

“Or you can think of the economy like a, I don’t know, economy where the best way to avert a depression is temporarily increase government spending. But that’s just based on reality and decades of hard data, not a simplistic metaphor.”
And taking a drink in the morning gets rid of your hangover.

“China has steadily continued to increase its holdings…”
The PRC intends to get a return on their investment. We’re not going to like paying it…Let me count the ways.

HEY, IF YOU MAKE ME PRESIDENT IN “12″, I WILL ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEE ECONOMIC SUCCESS! HOW? I WILL CUT CORPORATE TAXES DOWN TO AROUND 13 PERCENT AND ELIMINATE ALL CAPITAL GAINS TAXES. THIS IS A NO BRAINER – HAS BEEN TRIED BEFORE AND HAS SUCCEEDED BEFORE. WHY OBAMA WON’T DO THIS IS A TOTAL MYSTERY. WELL… MAYBE NOT A TOTAL MYSTERY – DOES NOT FIT IN TO HIS “SHARE THE WEALTH GAME PLAN.”

OBama continues to lie. AARP does NOT support his health care reform. OBama staged a little girl at his Town Hall meeting yesterday. The girl is the daughter of the chairwoman for Women for Obama. Ok, serious, folks, Obama needs to stop. Needs to be honest with Americans. I’m a Democrat and I can say this. No wonder our party is fighting all over the place!

Obama is doing such a good job. I am so proud of him for raising the deficit. This is just the change I was hoping for.

jhw, I found Mike’s analogy quite apt and a good way to visualize the situation. Sorry, but he’s right. It is rather like the silliness I kept hearing when the minimum wage was raised this summer. (No, I am not opposed to raising the minimum wage– just to bad economic explanations of what it all means.)
Reporters kept falling over themselves to report that these minimum wage workers would now have an extra 10 or 12 bucks in their paychecks each week to spend and that would potentially stimulate the economy. So where did these intrepid reporters — one on NPR was the worst– figure that money in those paychecks came from? Did it fall off a money tree somewhere? No, it came from their employers, who no longer had it to spend on other things, like equipment or advertising. That’s okay– employers have to make decisions about how to allocate resources and manpower is an important resource. But to pretend that money would suddenly be spent that was not being spent before the minimum wage went up is just plain silly.

“The US can afford to borrow, and the downside of not stimulating the economy – a full scale depression, with millions of labor hours lost to unemployment forever – is worse.”
Nonsense. The U.S. CANNOT afford to borrow. We are continuing to dig a deeper hole that we cannot get out of. The downside of not stimulating the economy is a sharper, more painful drop but a quicker recovery if the private sector is left alone and failed companies aren’t rewarded with trillions in bailouts.
Bernanke has guaranteed things will get worse, with skyrocketing unemployment and foreclosures, precisely because the Fed is doing all the wrong things, including monetizing huge amounts of debt (where taxpayers are borrowing their own debt because we can’t find foreign buyers for our bonds). Under Greenspan, the Fed helped create this problem and they are implementing the same loose money strategy now, which is exacerbating the problem. The Fed has robbed us blind and we have no idea where much of the money went.
Even if the U.S. dollar doesn’t totally collapse, we will still have significant inflation, higher commodity prices, and higher interest rates to cope with. It will devastate the economy. Keynesian economics will be totally discredited as the scam it is. It will be a harsh lesson for many, but it must be learned because apparently too many have been brainwashed by historical revisionism.
Blind faith in the lunatics running our government is a collosal mistake. My advice to those who will listen is to buckle down and save as much money as you can, pay off debt, and take care of your family. 2010 and 2011 will be much worse than this year. Take advantage of the time you have.

I read the U.S has 15 million unemployed. Yet I also read that 1.5 million immigrants came into the country in the last year. Our congress men/women are out of touch with reality. They may sit around and think about what the optimal population (taking in to account the environment). They should also worry about the impact on wages of the cheap labor policy. But in the short run the amount of net immigration should be very close to zero. Take a time out. With 15 million unemployed there is almost no occupation for which there is a legitimate shortage. An in the intermediate term we can with a little modest training take those that are unemployed with advanced degrees and put them to work in fields in which their is greater needs. For example, many Ph.D physicists with in months could become competent programmers.
Congress it is time to save America. Say not to special interest cheap labor advocates. Certainly the country would be ahead if some of the unemployed were trained as truck drivers instead of exporting the work to truck drivers based in Mexico.

The hole just keeps getting deeper.

Deep-ER. It was already deep. And everybody knew it would get worse before it got better. You want to see a balanced budget? Set the way back machine to 1999.

Wow did Obama ever pull the wool over the eyes of his sheeple to get him elected. Mr. No Experience has dug us further in debt and still hasn’t done squat to increase jobs inspite of all of his trillions he’s spending.
A complete joke and utter failure is what we have for a president.
Posted by: Paul | Aug 12, 2009 7:15
The only bright spot I can see in this entire dissater is at least Obama will be a one-term president. Gonna ba a hard 3 1/2 years.

Put down the shovel? But I just spent a trillion dollars on it! Oh well, plan b, lets just dig our way to china and crawl out the other side. Oh wait, cant do that, I owe those guys money…

The lets finance it mentality is what took California into the tank when people like Tom McClintock were yelling, “Look out!!!” Now the geniuses in the legislature are talking about attacking Prop 13. California has a very high and worsening foreclosure rate which affects tax revenue and raising the property tax rate to increase ?collected? tax revenue works how? Should we require an economic IQ test for qualifying to run for the legislature? The feds could look at California and have feedback that they might reconsider the path that they were on, but they wanted us to pay additional tuition for the same information.