One year ago the US had borrowed $455 billion from other nations (mostly China and Japan - see the list) to cover the Bush government's extreme spending spree for the year 2008.

Here we are one year later and Barrack Obama has tripled that figure to $1.42 TRILLION for the year 2009! Not only that, he is projecting that the debt will increase by nearly $1 trillion dollars per year over the next ten years!!

See the USA Today article - http://content.usatoday.com/communities/th.../10/620000005/1

But those figures are assuming the cost of his proposed national health care system won't balloon beyond their low cost projections - which assuredly they will. As I mentioned in another post, all we have to do to get a feel for how accurate the government is at cost projections versus actual costs is look at how well they did for other government run health care programs:

See this interesting article and its amazing chart on page 1 - http://jec.senate.gov/republicans/public/_...uly_31_2009.pdf

Here's another nice ingredient to toss into this witches brew: All of this debt spending assumes both China and Japan will continue to want to buy up our debt. That makes us fiscally dependent on the prolonged continuation of the whims of two other nations and is beginning to worry those economists with enough sense to see the corner we are painting ourselves into. What if China and Japan change their minds?

See - "US May Face 'Armageddon' If China, Japan Don't Buy Debt" - CNBC article, Set. 24, 2009

What's the Democrats' plan? Of course - spend MORE! Let's junk the nations health care system and fabricate a Rube Goldberg government run system at a cost of somewhere between a best case scenario of around $2 trillion (Harry Reid's guess) and $2.4 trillion (using the Massachusetts health care 1.2:1 estimate/actual cost error ratio as a guide) or $18 trillion (using Medicare cost estimate error ratio). We won't even entertain the possibility of using the Medicare DSH program's 17:1 cost error ratio. And still, after all that, we could have upwards of 20 million uninsured and an almost certain reduction in the quality of health care for the rest. Great plan Bozos!

Now, just for fun, throw into the mix how such a long term economic picture affects the future value of the dollar (we won't even bring in the effects of the wholesale printing of debt dollars) and how that will affect Japan and China's willingness to purchase more of our debt. Now we have a very noxious concoction brewing in our economic cauldron. Meanwhile the Democrats skip merrily around like fairies entranced in their spending euphoria, tossing into this brew more and more of their magical, yet costly, government-run cure-alls.

Tossing in more and more? Yep. Obama said this week, in the immortal words of the Carpenters, he's "only just begun"... Oh joy. Will there even be a USA after these people are finished making it better?

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Then who's gonna buy their crap?

There's a break-over point at which propping up a debtor via expanding their credit becomes too risky - even if that debtor is buying the creditor's goods. Until then, the "loans" become more and more expensive to obtain and the debtor finds himself increasingly crushed under their burden. He begins to borrow from one creditor to pay another. Even if the Chinese and Japanese refrain quitting the loan game altogether, the trend that we've set for ourselves is something like the heroin addict's "Catch-22" manner of dealing with his addiction - get more heroin. More heroin increases his addiction to heroin which then requires the purchase of more heroin.

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[Interesting fact: Since 1958, NASA has spent a grand total of $416 billion dollars. That's less than a third of how much more money Uncle Sam spent than was available for him to spend for the year 2009.]

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Here's another catch-22 for ya. By forcing the value of the dollar to go down, the less in relative value we owe China. Our Armageddon is their Armageddon.

Not really. It just forces the issue of jacking up interest rates on debt purchases to cover the shrinking-dollar phenomena (or suspending such purchasing altogether). There are already economists within China advocating such measures, arguing that the US has embarked upon an economic suicide mission and that continued large scale debt purchasing will only serves to help it in that mission. They argue that the continuance of propping up US debt will eventually bring such harm to the US's ability to pay on the debt that China will end up suffering nearly as much economic woe as the US itself. Meanwhile, as we creep up toward and around this bizarre limiting factor, the dollar plummets, the trade deficit increases, and the US productivity (the real measure of a nation's wealth) goes to Hell. Not a pretty picture. The bottom line is this: the cure for the economic woes brought on by a nation and its peoples' insatiable desire to spend more than they have certainly isn't a 300% increase in debt spending from one year to the next as the Democrats have managed in 2009 relative to the previous year! Nor is it in a plan of continuing such extravagance so as to accumulate around one trillion dollars more debt per year for 10 more years. Duh...

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Unemployment is a bigger problem in China than it is here and a lot of social unrest has resulted because of it. The Chinese economy desperately needs the US consumer. I know the right is prophesying doom and gloom but we're in this together. They need us just as much as we need them.

Just my opinion.

Allow me to throw the BS flag on that one. They love their dear leader, if they don't he shoots them. Here we just vote their stupid butts out.

The Chinese are the ones selling the rope, with which this administration will hangs us with. Just my opinion.

I agree with you. I didn't mean to give you the impression that I didn't in the last post. Our suicide is theirs as well. That's why they can't let that happen. They can't continue to underwrite our fiscal irresponsibility to the point where our harm damages their own economy. Unfortunately, our spend-crazies are busy fashioning an economy that depends on their continued participation in the scheme.

I don't know if you ever thought about it but there's a fascinating similarity between the way the Democrats are planning on financing their social revolution (as if we actually need to turn backwards) and the way the investment bankers were packaging and hawking off toxic debt under the guise of sound investment instruments ("derivatives"). Just as bankers like Lehman Bros. built a phony house of cards on the quicksand of selling excessive debt packages to global investors, so our current fiscal wizards are spending whatever they damn-well please and settling the bill by relying on, among other schemes, the packaging and selling of HUGE long-term debt to foreign nations as an "investment". It's a very subtle and deceptively dangerous scheme.

Something very fun to play with (but can be a little scary as well) --> check this out --> US Debt Clock - Real time. Our GDP is roughly $14 trillion/year. We are now in debt about $12 trillion. In 2020, if all goes according to Obama's current plans, we'll be in a $21 trillion deficit! That's a year and a half worth of GDP at the current figures! Out of that $21 trillion, about $7 trillion will be held by foreign nations. Now, let your head play at that Debt Clock web-site for a while - there's some fascinating and sobering seeds for thought there.

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ut, one thing about Mr. Id, you will catch on.

IT'S ALL GEORGE BUSH'S FAULT. WITH A HEAPING HELPING OF DICK CHENEY.

He repeats the mantra everywhere he goes.

Yea - that's pretty common. I've gotten to where things like "... those eight long years...blah,blah,blah" and charges of racism (when you're talking economics ) and much of the other standard rhetoric just kind of doesn't register in my consciousness anymore.

To be fair with Id though - in this topic at least, he and I are pretty much on the same page. In fact, I didn't let George Bush off the hook for his extravagant $455 billion deficit and I never let him off the hook for his stance (or lack thereof) on the issue of illegal immigrants. As a matter of fact, I had quite a few disagreements with him but they pale to insignificance when compared with my opposition to these Leftist jerks. Nancy Pelosie doesn't even have to open her mouth - at first sight of that SCUMBAG, I'm running to the barf bowl

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Since Archie brought up Dick Cheney, wasn't it he who famously said "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter"?

Maybe - don't know.

There are tolerable levels of debt that a nation (and/or an individual) can assume without doing serious harm. Obviously, beyond that there are intolerable and quite harmful levels that can be assumed as well. The course the Left has been mapping out for us is not toward the safer, healthier direction, that's for certain. They have very unfounded (on reality) notions on what wealth is and where it comes from.


Something to think about:

Article 1, Section 8, authorizes Congress to do 21 things. Three quarters of what they tax us for and spend OUR money on is nowhere to be found in that list. The average American currently works from Jan 1 through May 5 to pay for federal, state, and local taxes. The fruits of more than 1/3 of our labor are used in ways decided upon by others - while most of those expenditures are not even constitutionally legitimate. This unconstitutional expansion of government is what the great economist Friedrich Hayek called "the road to serfdom" - [Google it] - and what economist Walter Williams calls "the road to tyranny". It's plainly what the founders were desperately trying to prevent. They were all too aware of the tendency for government to expand at the expense of private resources and individual liberty. As Thomas Jefferson said, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground".

ut

So then, by your own statement, if little timmy jumps off the bridge you are following. I understand now.

I understand your concerns ut, but I see the US/China economic relationship as a uniquely symbiotic one which may well prove to be the defining issue of our day. We really are joined at the hip, IMO.

Even moreso, with the current administration, modeling things after the Chinese system.

The symbiosis would be a whole lot more symbiotic if it were merely a free trade one. Relying on them (and others) to fund our own out-of-control spending and govt expansionist policies is anti-symbiotic - it's bad for everyone - at least, on the massive scale we're talking about since Bush - and especially so now, with Obama and the Democratic Congress going berzerk. [That was a very long sentence ]

ut

Why is it that 131 people view this kind of stuff and yet only the same 4 people ever post anything? Does politics suck that much??? Never mind. I answered my own question.

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The web crawler. I just googled "china"+"uniquely symbiotic" and my last post was second out of 300 hits. Not that people are searching for that phrase but I'm sure that some of your finer points have been the topic of a few google searches by people who are interested in politics.

Put in "obama" and "goofus" - any hits?

BTW - what crawler ya got?

The crawler, he has requires monthly shots from the Dr. so he says.