
The Outstanding Public Debt as of 06 Nov 2007 is about:
$ 9,083,000,000,000.
That's $9 trillion.
The estimated population of the United States is 303,462,000, so each citizen's share of this debt is about $30,000. The National Debt has continued to increase an average of $1.43 billion per day since September 29, 2006. Debtor nations are subject to austerity programs under external control!
Update: Some people think that the deficit was a surplus under Clinton, but that was a brief period of yearly budget surpluses. Deficit spending became popular from the time of Keynes, especially with ex-prez Nixon who tried to hide the costs of the Vietnam War.
Joseph Stiglitz, a leading economic educator and professor at Columbia. explains The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush in Vanity Fair:
Think of the interest we are paying, year after year, on the almost $4 trillion of increased debt burden—even at 5 percent, that’s an annual payment of $200 billion, two Iraq wars a year forever. Think of the taxes that future governments will have to levy to repay even a fraction of the debt we have accumulated. And think of the widening divide between rich and poor in America, a phenomenon that goes beyond economics and speaks to the very future of the American Dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment