WASHINGTON — With no fanfare, President Bush signed a bill Monday pushing the ceiling on the national debt to nearly $9 trillion. The measure allows the government to borrow an additional $781 billion and prevent a first-ever default on Treasury notes. It also lets the government pay for the war in Iraq without raising taxes or cutting popular domestic programs. The debt limit increase was the fourth of Bush's presidency, totaling $3 trillion. With the budget deficit near record levels, an additional increase in the debt limit almost certainly will be required next year. The measure allows the debt limit to rise from $8.184 trillion to $8.965 trillion.
Yes folks that's 9,000,000,000,000$USD. Now given the fact that at the time I'm writing this, the world population is about 6.6 billion people, this means that if you spread out the US debt across the whole friggin world (!!!), each man-woman-child would owe about 1400$. If you reduce that down to the US population, about 295 million, that comes to a staggering 30 grand!
Canada's debt per capita is a third of this amount and people are already worried the country is going to go bankrupt. But since this is the US, everything is hunky-dory…
From the I-can't-believe-I'm-actually-reading-this-shit desk:
As ridiculous as this might sound, we have real money issues right now, and the government is reluctant to give all agents and analysts dot-gov accounts.
Said an FBI spokesman on why not all agents of the FBI are allowed to have an email account…
I believe that a country is bankrupt when it can't borrow anymore. So when the Chinese, Japanese and Arabs stop buying US treasury bonds. As long as the bank of the world thinks that the US credit is good, and a safe investment then the US can keep going into debt.
(http://livejournal.com/users/ignis)
That is so artificial and fake and a load of BS. Everybody is keeping the US afloat, not because of their faith in the administration or their faith in the possibility of getting the money back, but because every majoy economic benchmark is set against the greenback and if the US tanks, it's taking everybody with it. You can bet your ass that Dubya knows this and is using it for all he can.
Trouble is, the other major powers are realizing this, and are starting to worry. That's why the euro and the yen are getting lots of attention these days. People are starting to benchmark against those. Once the balance of power starts to shift, the US could go down the shitter right quick, imho…
(http://livejournal.com/users/talisker)