CNS:
The federal government’s debt could hit an unprecedented $16 trillion this week while the Republican Party is holding its national convention in Tampa, Fla.
On Monday afternoon, at the opening of the convention. the Republicans will try to draw attention to the mounting debt by unveiling a debt clock in the Tampa Bay Times Forum, where the convention will be held.
At an event in Waterloo, Iowa, earlier this month President Obama highlighted his own efforts to deal with the debt.“I’ll make sure government does its part to reduce our debt and our deficits,” the president said. “We’ve cut out already a trillion dollars’ worth of spending we don’t need. And we can do more. I want to make government efficient. We’ve got to make sure that your tax dollars are being well spent. But we can’t bring down our deficit and our debt just by asking us to get rid of things that open up opportunity to Americans.
“So instead,” said Obama, “we’re asking folks like me to go back to the rates we paid under Bill Clinton–which, by the way, was a time when we created 23 million new jobs, went from deficit to surplus, and we created a whole lot of millionaires to boot.”
[…]
So far in this fiscal year (from Oct. 1 through Aug. 23), the debt has grown by an average of $3,616,398,477.40 per calendar day ($1,186,178,700,586.99 divided by 328 days). Were the debt to grow at that pace in the week following last Thursday’s close of $15.976 trillion, it would hit $16 trillion this Thursday–the day Mitt Romney is scheduled to give his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination.
However, the debt does not grow in a steady, unbroken daily pace. Instead, it expands and retracts from day to day during the business week depending on the value of the bonds the U.S. Treasury sells and redeems. On a day that the Treasury derives more revenue from selling bonds than it pays out to redeem bonds, the debt increases.
Last Wednesday, for example, the debt actually declined by almost $9.7 billion–from $15,970,134,937,605.00 to $15,960,468,522,111.20—as the Treasury redeemed bonds of greater value than it sold. However, on Thursday, the debt increased by slightly more than $16 billion, ending that day at $15,976,519,029,144.14.
Also, the Treasury does not report the value of the debt reached at the close of any business day until 4:00 pm on the following business day. […]
[…]
Since Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the debt has increased $5,349,641,980,231.06. That is as much as the entire debt accumulated by the United States from the founding of the country in 1776 until Feb. 28, 1997, when President Bill Clinton was in his second term.
Thus, under Obama, the debt has increased more than under all presidents from George Washington through George H.W. Bush combined.
During President George W. Bush’s two terms in office, the debt increased $4,899,100,310,608.44. That is also more than all the debt accumulated by all previous presidents from George Washington through George H.W. Bush combined.
Nonetheless, the $5,349,641,980,231.06 in new debt accumulated in less than four years under Obama is more than the $4,899,100,310,608.44 in new debt accumulated in eight full years under George W. Bush.
According to data reported by the IRS earlier this year, there were 81,890,189 tax returns filed for 2009 that showed taxable income. That means the total debt of the United States now equals $195,096.86 for each 2009 federal taxpayer.
Blame it on Bush, blame it on Fox, blame on Twitter and the right wing blogs. But I didn’t vote for you — and I never thought you a Good Man or a garden-variety liberal Democrat who really did love the country and simply wanted to improve it. You don’t work to fundamentally transform what you already hold dear. Which is why I took you at your word when you said you were going to cripple the traditional energy sector; when you told us you’d use the bureaucracies to set price control and cripple industry while pretending you were concerned about clean air and clean water; when you remarked that the Constitution is a flawed document; and when you eventually told us, after having a super majority in power and foisting on us things we didn’t want, that the 2010 elections — meant specifically to prevent you from rushing forward toward your European-style democratic socialist Utopia — would prove largely ineffectual, because Congress has no right to block your imperial ambitions, and “we can’t wait!” to do the things that we don’t want you to do, but that you do nevertheless, with no check on your power: from unconstitutionally appointing leftwing ideologues during recess, to bureaucratically instituting cap and trade, to refusing to provide border security, to giving away amnesty in direct violation of immigration law, claiming prosecutorial discretion, to using HHS to mandate an end to essential religious liberties.
So you can’t blame me.
Can we all chant “U! S! A! … U! S! A!” now?
But what if I say it’s your fault for not making me listen to you?
Mathematically the federal budget cannot be balanced. What cannot be balanced shall not be balanced. What shall not be balanced shall naturally not be budgeted.
Bug or feature?
Obama 1: “If you have a business, you didn’t build that.”
Obama 2: ““So instead… we created 23 million new jobs, went from deficit to surplus, and we created a whole lot of millionaires to boot.”
The trinity is the deadbeat Kenyan father, the very prodigal son Barry, and the holy State.
Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Solution?
I spent a incredible day in Tampa yesterday listening to some old kook.
Whose organization had ten thousand of what I felt for six hours were probably the finest countrymen I could know absolutely energized and on their feet. For the first time in a hell of a long time I was proud of my country.
Takeaways?
1. Abolish all taxation…and replace it, I think, with State-contributed funds based, naturally, on power the States provide. Call it the ultimate supply and demand. Abolish every last federal agency in the social sector. It is they who have bankrupt the national government and corrupted its functioning.
2. Repeal Roe v Wade. Think these people are a bunch of Occupy nutjob anarchists? No. You have been misled.
3. The Liberty Movement is a spiritual movement — a thing operating in millions of minds as one value set — and it is organic. It has no intellectual leader. It is profoundly moral and principled…and it has been maligned and libeled. I saw zero Occupy content, zero protests, zero altercations, zero animus. No excess security, no lunatics, no controversy. Ten thousand speaking with one voice for six hours. I have never experienced anything like this.
The TEA Party is dead? While it’s concentrated itself in the enormous problem known as the Republican Party, if it’s operating like and having the successes the Liberty Movement is, this nation is about to change and change big. The solution is to overwhelm the local races. It’s working.
The establishment is scared out of its mind. Some old kook has, at 77 and on the eve of retirement, just become the most popular representative on the Hill. Do not believe what you’ve been told, including on foreign policy and the military. BHO hates the military and loves war.
Since liberty is the natural outcome of what is good and true and proper, this movement hates war and respects and supports the military.
State-contributed funding of the national government is part of what did in the Articles of Confederation, if I remember correctly.
Devolving social welfare onto the states is a go, as is overturning Roe.
I’ve never heard of the Liberty Movement.
The Liberty Movement is a spiritual movement
Sounds cultism.
We already did that. “O-ba-ma!” “O-ba-ma”
You can have Clinton tax rates when we get Clinton-era spending levels. Deal?
Can we also go back to the spending levels we had under Clinton? (id est, roughly half what you are spending now, you pusillanimous pissant…)
I’d be happy to pay slightly more if you will spend a whole lot less…
Getting rid of the Federal Departments and Agencies that didn’t exist then would be a good second step, and eliminating the usurped authority of those Grundy-ized old-timers would offer more steps after you’re done with those two…
Shouldn’t take more than a few strokes of the pen, given your recent precedents.
Sure leigh. How about let’s debate on the basis of your projection, shall we?
Your takeaway from the finest and most effective organized movement I’ve met to take back classical liberalism is Obama.
Judas priest.
I think I’d take that deal.
It would at least be entertaining to listen to the pigs squeal about draconian spending cut and balancing the budget on the backs of the poor, if such a proposal were to actually makes it’s way onto the floor.
Even a quarrelsome citizen like myself recognized that was a joke.
I’m not a big fan of Ron Paul (he has easily-observable flaws, as does any human) but his fiscal (and spiritual) concepts need be heard.
By “spiritual” I mean in the first dictionary definition: Of and related to the spirit.
In this case, a spirit deeply in unison and drawing from the moral clarity of liberation. Politics are only a tool; this medium was entirely about personal liberty.
– And tell us JHo, what would you do about the drunken wellfare cores of every major city in America, just pretend they don’t exist, or gear up for widespread rioting and have at it.
– The spidar web of Marxist infultration and control has reached systemic proportions, and that was done on purpose, specifically to resist any workable attempts to reverse its advance and cut off the tenticles of the beast.
– They learned their lessons well from old Joe and the Russian ecperience.
I don’t know, BBH, you tell me?
—
Having branded myself impure, I’ll go silent now.
You know, I considered this, and PW not being my place and my respect for Jeff and the dillo being what it is, you’ll notice I didn’t blog a word about it except in that one extended comment.
The point? Things are not what many of us — the pragmatic “conservatives” centrally and universally included — have been led to believe. Or read. Or repeated. Have we considered how a bill to audit the Fed — to strike at the heart of the beast, BBH — got all the House’s Republican and a assload of its Democrat support? And why only one dingy man with an ashen piehole stands between it and reality?
Seachange. Constant, local, inexorable. As it should be.
We have an option. Coming from this curmudgeon that might get some modicum of regard.
– And tell us JHo, what would you do about the drunken wellfare cores of every major city in America, just pretend they don’t exist, or gear up for widespread rioting and have at it.
I do not recall any rioting over welfare reform.
But if you do nothing and the system collapses under its own gravity (and that day is not that far away), you will see rioting then.
Heh. As if ‘spiritual’ (def 2) could possibly be taken out of our Republic’s skeleton, and it still remain upright.
Seen the “machete“? This is an Englishman’s newpaper printing this stupidity. One would think Englishmen and women editing newspapers might have heard tell of Gurkhas. One would then be thinking wrong, I guess.
Meanwhile, precrime moves on apace. Somehow, there’s little wonder at that.
– Tell you what? Seems to me I just did.
– I left the political scene almost entiurely for 2 1/2 years because you, and Jeff, and Darlene, and most PW’ers knew exactly what was coming, and I simply could not wrap my head around it.
– They would not listen, try as all here did, they just would not, so now they will reap what they sowed.
Me neither. I don’t even know if that’s its name or if it has one. It’s the best I could pick up, so decentralized this thing appears to be.
Thing is that accepting it full-on is itself liberating. This is what we have to do and we know it. We are who we’ve been waiting for.
Not oddly, out of 10,000, I’m guessing that about nine thousand got to their feet when asked to if they were, as I recall, under fifty, Hispanic, formerly independent, or formerly Democrat.
Whole chunks of the left have realized it’s been sold the biggest bill of goods in the modern era, while the middle is waking up. And racism? I fucking think not.
These people are a political light year ahead of the GOP.
Being dumbed down for slaughter is a big problem. But that doesn’t mean that enlightenment is dead.
– I do not mean to give the impression that I think the present situation irreversable, far from it. I actyally believe, and always have, that it was inevitable that the tide would turn. Its simply I’ve seen this movie before, and we all know that the end game of any nation that statism touches is much grief and suffering, and I don’t look forward to what is most surely coming next.
– Maybe we’ll get through it all with not that much hell and harm, but history is not particularly kind to that hope.
Some sort of collapse is baked into the cake at this point. There’s little R&R could ever do to stop it in the time they’ll be allotted even with aperfect plan and perfect execution.
Basically, its the choice between full tilt smoking crater and collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years of untidiness kinda thing where civil order is sorta/kinda maintained
Look, the money system is the key. Always has been. Some sort of collapse is baked into the cake at this point because the numbers cannot be made to work, not by any means other than globe-wide haircuts and a return to individual free trade of independent value.
– Yes to all of the above, but one thing that would expedite the recovery would most certainly be a healthy growing economy, similar to what we saw with Reagans election, coming out of the mess from the Carter years.
– I remember it well. It had people in tears, listening to his first address to the nation, and that mess was a childs toy compared to what we now face.
– Something I still have not found the answer to for all my years. Why, oh why, do men keep making the same damn mistakes over and over and over,
Look, the money system is the key.
– Yes, yes it is, and that’s exactly what has been undermined as a key part of the statist plan.
– There are some economists that say we need to go through adjustments now and then, that the free market has a life of its own and will self adjust over time with normal ups and downs.
– This problem we now face is not borne from those natural effects, but from an ideology that subverts the three pillors of a healthy society, liberty, moral perpitude, and motivation.
– Any hope for recovery must be rooted in a full return to those self-evident values as a working base just to start from. The statists have commondeered our educational system, our press, and vilified and reduced the effectiveness of our religios institutions, not just our government.
– The task ahead is formidable.
Sounds cultism.
Dude, you described 10,000 people swooning to the words of “an old kook.” How are we not supposed to pick up a cult vibe off of that? My first instinct was to double-check that L. Ron Hubbard hadn’t come back to life.
Don’t get me wrong — I know it’s no more fair a description than most of what was said about Beck’s crowd on the National Mall. But still, the mental image is hard to avoid.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/08/branco-cartoon-math-class-dropouts/
Good cartoon.
It’s best nobody get you wrong and invoke your unfair mental images, I’m thinking.
I’ll be over here working out better prose.
You know what they’re saying about how he packed Cowboy Stadium? Nothing. Scares the hell out of ’em. They don’t want to talk about FreePAC either. Same reason.
Look, Squid, what I said — or at least strongly alluded to for those who might like to reconsider their Republican-based preconceptions — is that in a venue packed with folks who, as far as I could tell to a man and to an ideal agreed on each component of the philosophy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for six hours were one unified force of nature.
As I said, this was a decentralized thing. These are your fellows, the scales fallen away and the shackles opened.
Name one component of that ideal — from respect for life to money to the nature of statism to the nature of the lie and the Press — and you, as a classical liberal, would be on board. As were they.
This is a cult? This is “swooning”?
You have hope, pal. Don’t squander it. You have the baddies on the ropes. What we’re living is a race to see who picks up the pieces. When all this takes hold what you have is clarity…and as Pablo alludes, tools like Chris Matthews bleeding from the mouth and nose at its awsome inevitability, even as it seeps in and smiling, has his job and his reason for existence.
Listen to the applause.
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/20459-The-Romneys-love-Costco.-I-can-relate-to-this-family-and-their-loyal-family-connection,-and-definitely-to-the-annual-family-Olympics..html
Cool Romney vid at Maggies Farm. I am starting to warm to the dude a little.
And Blame it on Bush is a catchy fucking tune. Been in my head all day.
And if he had been the King of France back in 732 they wouldn’t have lost 3000 Franks at Tours.
That is the biggest problem I have with Paul. His doesn’t have a foreign policy.
That and he’s an opportunist.
Those Moors just wanted a better life for themselves!
Heh.
Right. Because a dangerous old Troother kook with more military support than the other candidates combined and who has identified more waste, fraud, and corruption in his decades-long career and who, per Eisenhower, wants to audit the US’s nearly one thousand military bases — because the country just happens to be insolvent and all — surely has never had a constitutionally-sound “foreign policy” thought pass his feeble mind.
That’s got to be it.
Maybe it also follows that being central to the Republican Party’s discomfort as it strips the rules is also a bad thing.
I don’t know if this is Ron Paul’s rEVOLution in action that JHo’s been describing or not. If it is, I suspect, perhaps wrongly, that it won’t go anywhere anymore than did Ross Perot’s Reform Party —or for that matter, Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party before that.
Second and third to the last paragraphs.
Whether anybody hears me or not, I’m telling you that you have one hell of an option: Get involved locally. Do it now.
It’s working and it’s called the price of liberty.
Did we think it’d be any different?
I’ll tell you later. I have congresscritters to vote on today.
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