A few shocking truths about U.S. debt

 

by: Donna Nell

For a very long time, the leaders of both chief political parties have given assurance of fixing the current economic situation and getting the national debt under control. With the approaching election of 2012, they are making numerous wild pledges once again. It apparently seems that the United States has accrued so much debt, that they may hardly get out of this debt problem and bring their finances back on track. The present economic system is irreversibly broken. Nearly 30 years back, the U.S. debt was a shocking disaster that was entirely out of control. If the problem could have been handled at that point of time, perhaps something positive would come out of it. But presently the problem is much larger, and with every passing year, more than a trillion dollars is being supplemented to the existing debt.

Even the future generation is not provided with proper financial education. Words like “abuse”, “crime” and “theft” aren’t really sufficient to describe what’s being done to the coming generation. America was the wealthiest nation on the globe, but it wasn’t satisfactory enough just to waste the entire nation’s money.  The future of America seems quite gloomy and all its prosperity is possibly an illusion. The current economic prosperity has been gained at a cost of the largest amount of debt in the history of the planet. The U.S. debt crisis is so huge that it’s capable of destroying all that our forefathers built. Following are a few shocking truths about U.S. debt that you need to be aware of.

·       During financial year 2011, the American government spent 3.7 trillion dollars while its income was only 2.4 trillion dollars. In this year itself, the U.S. national debt exceeded 100 percent of GDP for the very first time ever.

·       According to Wikipedia, the economic base includes paper money, coins, and commercial banks' reserves with the central bank. Presently, the U.S. economic base is somewhere about 2.7 trillion dollars. During the year 2011, the American government spent more than 454 billion dollars simply on interest on the national debt.

·       The American government has net assets of 2.7 trillion dollars and has net accountabilities of 17.5 trillion dollars. The accountabilities do not even count up to 4.7 trillion dollars of intergovernmental debt which is presently payable. It is being anticipated that the American national debt will exceed 23 trillion dollars in 2015.

·       The U.S. government is confronting 34 trillion dollars in unfunded accountabilities for social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare, said the GAO. It also added that the percentage of debt owed by the public to GDP is expected to attain 287 percent of GDP by 2086.

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