Who are you to say who should pay attention to "their own"? It seems to me you've run out of arguments have resorted to just telling people where to go... We may have problems, but not as big as yours buddy.
lol, allow me to define my last post then: Your giving me words with no evidence of his intentions. View his other anti American threads here and you will see why (which is my contention). As another point, notice how he rails against anything similar posted against the UK (of which, I absolutely adhore as a nation, so no offense in that regard).
I posted a thread about US National debt to open a discussion. I had an input into that discussion i.e. I expressed some views. You deemed the thread anti-america for some reason, I guess because you aren't too smart. You started a thread about UK national debt which I guess is your 'retaliation'. You gave no input into any discussion about UK national deby (because its clear you dont actually have any views to put forward) All you posted were some links to data. Please MRMOJO, share your views on US national debt in this thread. Please MRMOJO, share your views on UK national debt in the other thread. ...for your convienience I have give you a few starters for you to copy and paste: your debt is bigger than my debt blah why dont you goddam brits worry bout your backyard OMG anti-american!!!
About those literacy levels I mentioned... lol Ah well. You adore the UK when you give Anti-England posts just as I give Anti-US posts? Also, you're just as defensive towards criticism of the US, so why does it surprise you I am of my country?
Well typing with a 3 yr old on your lap isnt the easiest thing , so forgive me for not being so inclined to impress you with my awesome 2 finger typing skills. It doesn't surprise me at all that one would defend their homeland. If one didn't defend their nation, then I would give pause to their inner minds. hence my problem with liberals
This guy seems to think we have a large debt problem....he is the head of the GAO...and is not political...
We have had this problem for many years now, Cheney Bush have bankrupted the nation, even children not yet born owe over $30,000.00 The Bush administration has sacked the Treasury for the benefit of the companies that supply Arms and Logistics (Halliburton) and have transfered taxpayer dollars into their own pockets! Warren Buffett, the worlds greatest investor warned years ago, that Americans would become a nation of sharecroppers living on land owned by China and Japan since they buy most of the mortgage backed securities and Treasury bonds and are the capital behind our banking system and government! http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/United_States.htm Should they pull the plug on funding us, the government would go into instant default, but they must continue to finance their largest customer or the financial and banking systems worldwide could go into shock! Alan Greenspan has warned us of the same as Warren Buffett many times! http://www.federalreserve.gov/boardDocs/speeches/2005/20050204/default.htm `````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
That article was dated 28th Oct 2006. Thanks for posting it. The numbers speak for themselves really. The bush clan will keep talking about tax cuts as if they are beneficial to the economy when in reality they are creating a real problem. The government debt problem is an issue that will one day have to be confronted.
Mixmaster: Mr Walker, as referenced above, hit the nail on the head with the debt issue. First, the issue isn't being addressed by current politicians. The debt issue doesn't hit as real to people today....because it hasn't reared its ugly head in today's environment. Its potential growth is mind boggling. When it gets real bad think of Argentina. The nation went bankrupt. The economy went to the pisser. HUGE HUGE percentages of the working population lost jobs. The value of the Argentinian currency went into the toilet. The nation has easily lost a decade of potential economic development. Easy. On a business/economic basis I lived through the very serious economic debt depression that hit the US economy in the late 1980's/early 1990's. The depression hit because of crazy unlimited lending into the commercial real estate markets across the country. Commercial properties were way overbuilt in the 1980's. Their was too much space built and the market couldn't be filled. The level was so large that it affected the national banking industry. Banks went under. All loans were watched closely. Non-commercial property loans were called because the banks were facing massive losses. That had a chilling effect on the real estate industry...but extended into the national economy across the board. Basic business expansion loans were limited, normal lending for factoring (inventory financing) was restricted. The whole economy was hit....though not as drastically as where it started the commercial real estate industry. How bad was it? Certain properties lost ALL Value...for a period of 1-3 years. They were worth 0. Say a property was 100,000 feet and was valued (theoretically) at $100/foot. That is $10 million lost for a year to 3. Buildings at that value finally started getting some value back and were selling again at $0.20 on the dollar and up. It took about 6-8 years before the lending and building industry started to rebound. Think about it. The real estate industry is one of the 2 or 3 biggest employers in the country and about 1/3 to one 1/2 of the whole industry was worthless. Compared to a country as a whole though that is miniscule. 2. Current politicians won't touch the subject. A. First it is clearly very complex. B. It will be hard to deal with possibly requiring both reductions in expenditures and increasing revenues. Again current politicians won't touch it. 3. Current politics makes it doubly hard to deal with because of the powerful political powers that are so violently anti-tax. If a politician opens his/her mouth about any tax issue whatsoever on a local, state, or national level they open themselves up to be skewered by the opposite side. So no-one will touch the issue. If people haven't lived through tough debt issues they don't know what they are talking about. Debt never sleeps. When a debt holder calls the debt and you can't pay up everything goes to sh*t. On a national basis that is what happened to Argentina. On an industry, business, or personal level it sucks. Its obvious the impact of rising federal debt has yet to hit American's in the face. The debt goes up a billion or $10 billion....no one feels it today. Gas prices go up a $1/gallon today and if you have a car and drive 20,000/miles a year and you get 20 miles to the gallon. You are spending $1,000 more a year. Get hit by an increase in your real estate taxes because of increases in property values (but not tax rates) bingo that can take a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand dollars out of your pocket today. Those are real things that have hit real Americans on a real basis this year and over the past few years. Raise a tax today and it takes $1,000 more out of your pocket - same impact. That stuff is easy to talk about, rant about, make political hay about etc. If the debt grows like Mr Walker and economists from both sides showed that will suck the life blood out of people. The scary part is that we are moving there dramatically faster and are nearing danger points so much more quickly than a year, 2 years, ten years ago. I'd like to see it addressed earlier than later. The longer one waits the less alternatives you have and the harder the medicine to correct it. I lived through it on a personal and industry basis. In retrospect I saw the underpinnings of it occurring at least 6 years before the market exploded and died. I knew there was no financial sense to transactions but I was making them (and making money). I could not see or understood what would occur on a grand scale. I think Mr. Walker's effort is excellent. I doubt if political people will start acting on it till the pain actually starts to hit.
Good post earlpearl. The chances are very good we'll go into Argentina-like collapse and it's a good idea to get out of US dollar and arrange your affairs to survive unemplyment and devaluation of dollar. I believe FRB is printing about 20% of new money a year now, and it's a matter of a few years before this money reaches consumer and leads to high inflation
The way politicians deal with these sort of problems is really dependant on public attitude to the policy changes required. Here in the UK the idea of a party wanting to lower taxes is generally seen as a bad thing. People here have come to understand that tax cuts mainly benefit the rich and leaves less money for public services. The main oppostion party here in the UK are the Conservatives and they have the image of being the party of the rich because they generally favour cutting taxes. The bush clan have boasted about cutting taxes and will demonise the democrats for wanting to increase taxes but the average person is actually worse off because of the tax cuts. No politician will even go near the national debt issue until after the 2008 elections. This is a 'spend now and pay tommorow' issue that the bush clan are benefitting from because they have taken advantage of the misconception that tax-cuts are beneficial to the average american. I hope the damage the bush clan have done with their short-term policies will be revealed eventually.
I'd say its a good time to by gold. People will wake up to the problem as soon as it affects inflation, unemployment or interest rates.
I got out of dollar in 2005 and am up to my eyeballs in gold, but I also think any commodity will do great. Anything not tied to dollar will do well. Except for foreign currencies, because when our economy takes a hit the whole world will be affected to some degree I wouldn't put all blame on Bush. Haliburton, Bechtel, etc. did very well under Bush, but other Presidents contributed to this, both Republicans and Democrats. (Where would you get money for presidential compaign if you didn't cater to big business?)
I did a little research on the impact of the commercial real estate debt driven depression of the very late 1980's and early 1990's to see if there is any analogy with government debt. In latter 1989 (I think that is when it hit) all lending for speculative office development stopped across the country. There is a glut of office space from a debt of over spending on building office buildings. There was huge vacancy. New buildings were called see-throughs. They were vacant. You could look at the window line of a new building. There was nothing built in it and you could see through to the other side. I think I recall reading that during the 1980's there was more suburban office building constructed in the United States than all the suburban office building in total built before that decade. I went back and looked at one suburban county outside of Washington DC. I worked in this field and area during this period. The county is Fairfax County which is large, wealthy and has an enormous office market. In 1980 it had a little more than 20 million square feet of office space. By 1990 it had over 67 million square feet. In 1980 the vacancy rate (empty space) was less than 2%. By 1990 the vacancy rate was over 18%. (of note Fairfax county and the whole Washington DC area has had lower vacancy rates than the rest of the US by a lot.--It is the longest term strongest office market in the nation.) As early as 1983 I was working on deals for office buildings that never made financial sense. The projected rents weren't going to cover debt service (mortages) and costs of running the buildings. Regardless the buildings were going up like Mushrooms. This was occurring all over the country. The overall US vacancy rate was dramatically higher than in Fairfax. All lending to commercial speculative office building stopped. Government controls were established on the banking industry. With that occurring millions of people across the country were thrown out of work; construction people, architects, and everyone connected to the industry. Purchasing of materials for office construction stopped. A huge impact on domestic industries. Lending was restricted for all sorts of businesses. It was a drastic time. The debt induced real estate depression didn't affect everyone but it was devastating in that and all associated businesses. Further the restrictions on loans slowed business development across the board. It was easy to get loans to proceed with an office building. Every restriction was removed. down payments were dramatically reduced. Interest rates were low. There were very limited personal restrictions in the event of a building failure. Developers were building like wild fire. It was easy for them to make money. They got other people's money to invest in the building for say 10%. The banks loaned the rest. The developers had no recourse loans. That meant in the event of failure there was no recourse on their other assets. The developers would build with huge development fees. That is how they made some of their money. They also had a piece of the buildings, even with no cash into it. If the buildings were successful and creating cash....great they were making money. Even if they weren't they were banking on selling the buildings for a profit. So when all lending dried up everything stopped, people lost their jobs, the economy was seriously stunted, buildings ultimately lost 70-80% of their value. All of that could have been prevented. Tighter lending restrictions established a couple of years earlier would have prevented the depression. If 20% less construction would have occurred in Fairfax the system would have been at what people in the industry call equilibrium. There would not have been a catastrophic collapse. At least 2 years before the collapse I recall smarter people than I warning of bad signs. Nothing was done to slow down the development and the result was a catastrophe. The analogy is similar for the looming federal debt issue. Smaller steps taken earlier can slow down the ominous growth of the federal debt. They would have none of the consequences that have faced Argentina over the past couple of years. (Argentina went bankrupt). The sooner it is done the less the consequences and the easier the nation will deal with this looming disaster.