Umm, can we afford the minimum monthly payment?

[mister_happy]

Recently, our debt exceeded $10 trillion. To which one might wonder, can we afford the minimum payment? You can give a lot of crap to people who take out too much credit card debt, but the US government has taken out $80,000 in MY name, without my permission, and I am disinclined to pay for services rendered

Comments

[damgo]

That's not really accurate Ian. To get that 10+ trillion figure you have to include money the federal government owes itself. (eg money the general fund owes to the Social Security fund.) Now obviously the government can owe itself an arbitrarily large amount of money without, in fact, any real consequences whatsoever.

The actual figure is ~$5.3 trillion, about $18,000 per capita. That's a nontrivial amount, but it's not really a lot in the scale of things. Our debt/GDP ratio is only 0.37 or so. I think countries are usually only considered to have a real debt problem when their debt/GDP ratios go above 1. After all people regularly take out mortgages greatly exceeding their yearly income. And the US government has all sorts of advantages ordinary people don't: it can force people to give it money, it can print money, it's effectively immortal, etc.

[mister_happy]

Ah, makes sense. So we actually have a $5.3t real debt plus a $5t debt to ourselves.

I guess that makes sense. I'm not sure how much better I feel, though since the debt becomes real when the baby boomer generation retires. Unless the market drops enough that they can never afford to retire...

[mateorabi]

or we start putting them against the wall. :-)

or at least just up the retirement age till the % of people over that age is == the % that were over 65 when the program started.

the bluehairs would never allow it though.

[mister_happy]

Yes, that was how I noticed, admittedly.