Wasn’t the Super Bowl wonderful this year? Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers! It is amazing how much money people will spend to attend this game each year. Just a few hours before kickoff, some tickets were selling for over $4000 a seat. Not that it wasn’t a great show. It turned out to be a really great game and it was held in perhaps the most extravagant sports facility ever constructed in the history of mankind. Even the halftime show, featuring the Black Eyed Peas, was a spectacle of historic proportions. This year the Super Bowl truly was quite a grand party. In America, everything always has to be bigger and better. We take pride in constantly outdoing ourselves. Other nations of the world look at our great prosperity in envy. But do we ever stop to ask ourselves where all of this great prosperity has come from and if we can continue to afford it all?
The sad truth is that we were once the wealthiest, most prosperous nation on the planet, but now we are deeply drowning in debt. America has become a debt pig that is deeply addicted to debt-fueled prosperity. We had more than any other nation on the planet by far, but that was never good enough for us. We always had to have more. So we borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. Now, average household debt is far larger than average household income, state and local governments across the nation are on the verge of default and our national government has piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world.
Just read the statistics compiled below. Is there anyone out there that can deny that America has become a fat, bloated debt pig that is completely and totally out of control?
So I hope that you enjoyed the spectacle of Super Bowl Sunday, because there won’t be too many more times like this. The greatest debt-fueled party in the history of the world is rapidly coming to an end, and pretty soon it will be time to start turning out the lights.
The following are 17 statistics about debt in America that are almost too outrageous to believe….
#1 The U.S. national debt is now well over 14 trillion dollars and it is being projected that the U.S. government will have the biggest budget deficit ever recorded this fiscal year.
#2 It is estimated that the U.S. national debt will increase by $150,000 per U.S. household between 2009 and 2021.
#3 During Barack Obama’s first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.
#4 Unfunded liabilities for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare are estimated to be well over $100 trillion, and nobody in the U.S. government seems to have any idea how we are actually even going to come close to meeting all of those obligations.
#5 When you add up all forms of debt in the United States (government debt, business debt and consumer debt) it comes to approximately 360 percent of GDP. This represents the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world by far.
#6 Today, state and local government debt has reached at an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP.
#7 Unfunded pension benefit liabilities at the state government level – the amount state governments owe in promised retirement benefits beyond what they have collected – exceed $3 trillion.
#8 Average household debt in the United States has now reached a level of 136% of average household income. In China that figure is only 17%.
#9 Today, 46% of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month.
#10 Of U.S. households that have credit card debt, the average amount owed on credit cards is $15,788.
#11 Americans now owe more than $887 billion on student loans, which is even more than they owe on credit cards.
#12 A staggering 25 percent of all American adults now have a credit score below 599.
#13 According to a survey released very close to the end of 2010, 55 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. The sad truth is that most of us are maxed out.
#14 1.5 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2010. That represented the fourth yearly increase in bankruptcy filings in a row.
#15 One out of every 45 U.S. households was hit with a foreclosure filing in 2010.
#16 The number of American families that were actually booted out of their homes and into the streets set a new all-time record in 2010.
#17 Even as the suffering of the poor is going up the generosity of the wealthy is going down. It turns out that America’s wealthiest individuals gave a lot less money to charity in 2010.