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Mix-Ansicht- US- Staats-Schulden pro Einwohner: $20.000 - André, 06.08.2002, 22:25
US- Staats-Schulden pro Einwohner: $20.000
"We've got a lot of work to do to make sure people can find work,"
Bush said before leaving the White House for a long weekend at his
parents' home in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Translation: more government spending. And the one thing our
government does better than anyone or anything else in the world is
take on debt. In the 1990s the federal government created $2.8
trillion of new debt -- more than it created in the nation's entire
history prior to 1990.
Fiscal Year 2000 ended with the highest dollar debt in U.S. history
-- despite the Clinton administration promise to post a government
surplus. In fiscal 2001 debt was $133 billion more. At the end of
this fiscal year government debt will total $6 trillion.
When numbers get this huge, it is hard to put them into perspective.
But let's try. Federal debt today totals more than $20,000 per
American, or to over $80,000 for a family of four -- half of which
has been created over the past 10 years.
Polyanna economists (and there are getting to be fewer of them), say
this is money we owe ourselves, so it doesn't matter. But they
couldn't be more wrong. Foreigners control 44% or more of the $1.2
trillion in Treasury bonds and T-bills, double the percent they held
in 1990.
This puts the dollar in peril on any given day. If foreigners begin
to believe that Washington will bail out the economy even if it has
to forsake the dollar, they will leave in droves, pushing down the
value of the greenback and pushing up the prices of commodities.
Even still what if the debt was money we owe to ourselves? We owe
it, and it has to be paid. And debt carries interest. That means
more must be spent on interest, leaving less money for education,
infrastructure and defense.
The Grandfather Economic Report series says that since 1988 interest
growth alone grew from $214 billion per year, to $362 billion in
2000. That's a 70% increase in just 12 years, and it keeps growing.
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