As the world watches in horror as the financial nightmares in Greece, Spain and Portugal unfold, most Americans are oblivious to the fact that a great day of financial reckoning is soon coming to the United States as well. The truth is that the United States is not “the richest nation in the world” anymore. What the United States actually has become is the biggest debtor in the history of the planet. In our lust for the “good life” and the American Dream we have spent ourselves into a financial black hole from which there is no escape. U.S. government spending has been wildly out of control for decades, but over recent months Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their cohorts have taken things to an entirely new level. Certainly it cannot be denied that the Bush administration badly mismanaged America’s national finances, but budget deficits during his administration were generally in the three to five hundred billion dollar range.
So what is the U.S. budget deficit projected to be for 2010?
1.6 trillion dollars.
In fact, the Office of Management and Budget in Obama’s White House estimates that the federal budget deficit this year will be approximately 10.6 percent of GDP.
In case you wondering, yes, that is really, really, really bad.
The U.S. government has already piled up the biggest mountain of debt that the world has ever seen, and we are adding to it at a staggering rate.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, on June 1st the U.S. National Debt was $13,050,826,460,886.97.
How in the world did we get over 13 trillion dollars in debt?
How is that even possible?
If you were alive 2000 years ago and you started spending one million dollars every single day when Christ was born, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.
That is how large one trillion dollars is.
In fact, if you went out today and started spending one dollar every single second it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend a trillion dollars.
But the United States is not one trillion dollars in debt.
The United States is 13 trillion dollars in debt.
If you donated one dollar every single second to pay off the national debt, it would take you over 403,000 years to come up with enough money to pay it off.
Are you starting to get the picture?
We are in trouble.
And unfortunately, the debt just continues to accelerate.
Based on data from the International Monetary Fund, it is being projected that the national debt will exceed the gross domestic product of the United States in 2012.
That is a threshold that many economists are warning us that we must not cross.
But cross it we will.
And it isn’t just government debt that is the problem.
The total of all government, corporate and consumer debt in the United States is now equal to 360 percent of GDP. That is a far greater level than the U.S. ever approached during the Great Depression.
So are our politicians and leaders doing anything about this horrific crisis?
No, they keep on spending money like Wall Street executives that have been let loose on the Vegas strip.
Obama, Pelosi and Reid continue to push an endless parade of insane spending bills, but now even some of their Democrat allies are thinking that maybe enough is enough.
During a “closed-door meeting” with a small group of House Democrats last month, Nancy Pelosi heard complaints from members of her own party that were not happy about having to vote on big spending bills at a time when many American voters think government spending is wildly out of control.
Now why in the world would American voters think that U.S. government spending is out of hand?
Could it be the $2.6 million tax dollars that was spent to study the drinking habits of Chinese prostitutes?
Could it be the $400,000 tax dollars the U.S. government paid researchers to cruise six bars in Buenos Aires, Argentina to find out why gay men engage in risky sexual behavior when drunk?
The examples could go on and on.
When it comes to wasting money, nobody does it better than the U.S. government.
But guess what – you can help.
The U.S. government is actually taking online donations that will go towards paying off the national debt.
You can help bail out Obama, Pelosi and Reid.
Of course whatever money you send them will probably be thrown right down the drain as well.
The truth is that we have become a wildly corrupt society that is recklessly throwing away the national wealth that our forefathers left to us.
But instead of taking responsibility and working to correct their mistakes, members of the Obama administration are blaming capitalism and the free market for our troubles.
In fact, a key member of Barack Obama’s Fiscal Responsibility Commission says that “worshipping the market” has failed America.
What in the world?
So what will work?
European-style socialism?
Things aren’t going too well for Europe either.
The truth is that the entire globe is now caught in the grip of a devastating sovereign debt crisis.
So just how bad are things going to get?
Anthony Fry, the senior managing director at Evercore Partners, recently told CNBC that things are getting so bad out there that he is “considering investing in barbed wire and guns”.
Yes, the good times are just about over.
But it did not have to turn out this way.
We could have lived within our means and left America in great shape for the generations that follow us.
But we did not do that.
Instead we have saddled our children and grandchildren with the greatest debt burden in the history of the world.
What we have done to future generations is beyond criminal. One day, if they get the chance, they will look back and curse this generation for what we have done to them. We spent all their money and we have stuck them with the bill for our wild excesses. We have taken the great American economic machine and we have driven it straight off a cliff.
And yet we are so proud of ourselves. We think that we are so special and that we have all the answers.
The truth is that we have wrecked the financial future of all the generations of Americans that are going to follow us. Over and over we kept sending the same jokers back to Washington D.C. and they kept on spending our money like it was some kind of giant game of Monopoly.
So now we are going to pay the price.
All of us.
A tremendous amount of economic pain and hardship is coming and it is going to affect all Americans. Nobody is going to be able to escape it completely. We are about to reap what we have sowed. We are heading into what many analysts are already calling “the greatest depression”.
Already 40 million Americans are on food stamps. But things are going to get a lot worse in the years ahead. The America of tomorrow is not going to be anything like the strong, powerful, prosperous country that we all used to know and love.
But it is our fault. We continued voting for the members of both political parties that kept recklessly getting us into increasing amounts of debt year after year. We did not keep them accountable. We did not wake up. So now we are going to pay a very hard price.
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