USA: The Biggest Debt Beat Of All Time

[merkins]

This article is quite a doozey of a read on politics & economics, and thought I'd toss it in the mix:


To see this is like watching the edge of an expanding black hole in interstellar space, but this is a financial hole on the verge of swallowing an entire nation. The federal government's long-term financial obligations grew by $US 2.5 TRILLION last year, a reflection of the exploding costs of Medicare and Social Security benefits as more baby boomers reach retirement age. As reported in a USA Today analysis, American taxpayers are on the hook for a record $US 57.3 TRILLION in federal liabilities to cover the lifetime benefits of everyone eligible for Medicare, Social Security and other government programs. That's $US 500,000 per household. When the liabilities of State and local governments are added to this, the total rises to $US 61.7 TRILLION. That's $US 531,472 per household, more than four times what Americans owe in personal debt and mortgages.

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At some point, Americans will start to realise the reality of this debt morass. They will try to count their own individual assets and, at that point, a national panic will take place. Today most Americans have more personal, household and other liabilities than they have assets. Once this sinks in, the US will be at the trigger-line of a social revolution because the physical assets Americans do have control over will, to most, become a life and death matter. To be stripped of them - as so many Americans are now being stripped of their houses – will mean to be left destitute in the street with nowhere to go.

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Along this road, a point is always reached where the public realises that their own lives are going nowhere because of the climbing costs of the external wars. An example here is the US where real American living standards have not improved since the early 1970s. In 2001, in the midst of recession and after 9/11, the US political "elite" declared war - on "terror". Then came the attack on Iraq. Five years later, the US armed forces are still there in an unwinnable war. The costs are killing the fiscal budget of the US and Treasury debts are soaring. In response to the increasing resentment felt by ever more Americans, the US political establishment has established a full-scale internal surveillance state, always only a step away from a police state.

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The political elite now faces an American public which has realised that the US has failed in its military campaign in the Middle East as well as having failed as the economic managers of the US economy. This is the most dangerous point of all. Politically, this is the point where the political elite has to make its final choice. That choice is to maintain its external policy at the internal cost of full-scale repression or to give away its external policy at the very likely political cost of a total loss of internal political power. Historically for the United States, the outlook is not good. No political elite nor its political establishment has ever vacated power without an immense internal political and/or physical struggle to maintain it.

Much more here:
http://nehalemaction.blogspot.com/2008/05/us-biggest-debtbeat-of-all-time.html