United States of Debt

It seems in Washington your position shifts based on whether or not your party controls the White House. For 8 years we heard from Republicans about the dangers of ignoring the runaway deficits and the impact our national debt will have on future growth and future generations. Now they have taken the position that the only way to reduce the deficit is to slash taxes and let growth pay it back. Unfortunately, math is not on their side after doing nothing the past 40 years to reduce our national debt. Making things worse, corporations  continued to make heavy use of debt despite the economic recovery, and households have again decided to load-up on debt.

 All of this has to be paid back at some point & when that comes it will have a deeply negative impact on economic growth. The levels we are at relative to GDP have historically led to well below average growth for decades in other countries.

How bad is it? USDebtClock.org does a running tally of our debt and more importantly the amount per citizen. Here’s a snapshot of it earlier this afternoon.

The $168,854 per taxpayer is bad enough, but the real issue is the nearly $900,000 each taxpayer is supposed to cover when we factor in the unfunded promises made in the Social Security & Medicare programs. How bad is it? Check out John Mauldin’s latest for more.