Friday, October 11, 2013

Oh, and By the Way...We're Broke

Soon, President Obama and Congress will agree to terms on raising the statutory debt limit, or the "debt ceiling."  What will not be mentioned in the negotiations, however, is that the United States of America is bankrupt.

In a 2011 discussion about how spending cuts might impact jobs in the federal government, House Speaker John Boehner said, "If some of those jobs are to be lost in this, so be it.  We're broke."  Two years and one major credit downgrade later, the only thing that has changed is how much more broke we are.

As a nation, we're broke.  Flat busted.  Tapped out.  The coffers are empty.  We have no money.  This chart shows America's debt trajectory relative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

In May 2012, the national debt started growing faster than GDP, which means we are borrowing at a faster rate than we produce.  In The Great Reckoning, James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg warned that "debt cannot go on compounding faster than output forever."  For America, the day of reckoning has come.  

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