November 6, 2007

U.S. National Debt = $ 9,083 Billion

U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK says:
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.

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