The Largest Outlay In American History
http://www.ritholtz.com/...
Wow!
I would argue that the most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but our own fiscal irresponsibility
—David Walker, former comptroller of the United States
former GAO Comptroller General David Walker said sometime last year:
"If the federal government was a private corporation and the same report came out this morning, our stock would be dropping and some people would be talking about whether the company’s management directors needed a major shake-up".
"The federal government’s total liabilities," Walker explained, "translates into a de facto mortgage of about $455,000 for every American household and there’s no house to back that mortgage. In other words, our government has made a whole lot of promises that, in the long run, it cannot possibly keep without huge tax increases."
Now with the $12 Trillion bail out it’s probably $650,000 for every American household
Yet politicians on both sides keep kicking the can down the road.
The USA is hooked on a dysfunctional economic system totally dependent on increasing debt and faux GDP growth and the MSM and Obamanomics are doing their best to keep the ruse going.
kunstler can be ‘out there’ at times but I think he’s depicted sobering reality with this post.
Hunky Dory
http://kunstler.com/...
August 3, 2009
Excerpts:
Those in the broad bottom 95 percent were content as long as there was a chance that they, too, could become members of the top 5 percent — by dint of car-dealing, or house-building, or mortgage-selling, or some other venture enabled by easy credit and a smile. Those days and those ways are now gone. The bottom 95 percent are now left with de-laminating houses they can’t make payments on, no prospects for gainful work, re-po men hiding in the bushes to snatch the PT Cruiser, cut-off cable service, Kraft mac-and-cheese (if they’re lucky), and Larry Summers telling them their troubles are over. (If I were Larry, I’d start thinking about a move to some place like the Canary Islands.)
Too many disastrous things are lined up in the months ahead to insure that we’re entering a new phase of history:
The Long Emergency.
Government at every level is worse than broke.
Our currency, the US dollar, is hemorrhaging legitimacy.
Inability to service old debt at all levels or incur new debt.
Bad (toxic) debt lurking off balance sheets everywhere.
The housing bubble fiasco is far from over.
Commercial real estate fiasco just getting started.
Unemployment rising implacably.
So-called "consumers" unable to consume consumables.
Crucial energy import supply lines fragile.
Food supply subject to energy problems and climate abnormalities.
A world full of other societies who would enjoy watching us fail and suffer.
Here, in the dog days of summer, it seems to me that the situation in the USA is so fundamentally bad, so unpromising, so booby-trapped for failure, that I wonder if there has ever been a society so badly deluded as ours. We’re prisoners of our wishes, living in a strange dream-time, oblivious to the forces gathering at the margins of our vision, lost in a wilderness of our own making.
Update:
Obama Says Economy Is ‘Pointed in Right Direction’
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The president, who took no questions from reporters.
Gee wonder why ?
At one point, Mr. Obama said, "We won’t rest until every American that is looking for work can find a job."
In a coincidence that was probably not intended, the president was quoting his predecessor almost verbatim: In the summer of 2004 President Bush said "We won’t rest until everybody who wants to work can find a job.""