what should we believe is a safe debt as a percentage of our nation's annual income? i believe we are currently around 70%. if you make 100k a year, would you hesitant to purchase a house for 70k? of course not. it would be crazy not to. it is perfectly reasonable to spend beyond your means in this way, like cparso said. plus, if you are borrowing at an effective rate of 5%, and you can use that money for growth at 6%, you should always borrow as much as possible. a large debt isnt necessarily a sign of a bad president, far from it. bush is an mediocre president in terms of the economy. he knows that debt isnt bad, and not raising taxes is good, but he is far too against free-trade, which could basically save the world. spending isnt bad necessarily, but it is terrible when it works against the free market, which it often does. certainly the democrats are worse with their "we need to raise taxes to pay down the debt" philosophy, as well as their favoring of obviously crowd pleasing but horrible things like minimum wage increase. democrats love to take advantage of public ignorance of issues like minimum wage for cheap political points.
But don't you see a devalued currency coupled with inflation is bad. We are not responsibly managing our debt. Having a mortgage is one thing, but we are paying off credit cards with credit cards that charge more interest. Foreign ownership of debt runs a two prong risk. One being that countries will stop buying our debt instruments. Another is that major creditors will dump our bonds in large amounts at one time. Both of these hurt the value of our currency and hurt our international buying power.
the question no one ever answers is why the bible is better than the koran or the book of mormon or whatever anyone else reads. write a book of nonsense with 1 follower, you are a heretic. same book, a million followers, you are a prophet, and people are afraid to criticize it. it really speaks to how spineless we are as a species. when you really understand why you havent chosen those other books, it should lead you to understand why you shoudnt believe the bible.
I've explained this before. The national debt is not at all like a mortgage. When you borrow money to buy a house, you have the house as an asset to balance the debt. You can always sell the house and get out from under the note. The National Debt is more like a student loan. You have no asset to show. You borrowed the money to pay expenses and now you must pay interest on it until it is paid off, if ever. We are paying 406 billion dollars a year as interest on the National Debt, even as it keeps growing. $406 billion and growing each and every year is wasted money. The alarming size of the debt is one reason the Euro is increasingly replacing the Dollar as the preferred currency around the world. Because they are a potential superpower rival. The Bank of China is buying up all of the US treasury notes it can. They make a ton of interest each year and in a crisis they could dump their vast dollar holdings onthe market and collapse the dollar.
obviously it depends on what you spend it on. if you spend it on the war, that is an investment in a peaceful future. if you buy highways or cops, all that is investment, and very worth going into debt for. i am aware that the bush administration likes to spend money on all sorts of wasteful programs, and you favor many of them yourself, social security being the best example. but just because you not have a tangible item like a house doesnt mean the money wasnt well spent. of course your point is taken that so much of the spending is on waste. i half agree. debt is fine, waste isnt. what % interest do you think they make? damn tabbed browsers are slightly beyond my ability to control. i need to learn to keep the open tabs to under 10 or i expose myself as an idiot who cant tell one from the next.
This is the scariest thing to me. The Italians dumped their dollar holdings a few years ago because it was no longer serving as an effective hedge against inflation. Other European nations have contemplated following suite. If some of our big creditors like China, the EU, or my Grandmother ever dropped their holdings our currency would lose a lot of power.
Just looking at the national debt raw number tells you very little. Of course the raw number will continue to up as we grow. Many compare the national debt to GDP as a better gauge and a way to compare us to other countries. I don't know what the right precentage should be, but the numbers under Bush aren't as scary as some want to make it out to be. Here's a historical graph...
Are we now? Still the R's fault? Yep, Obama got him.. Not even close...... And replaced with Democrat ones...... LOL You serious??? HA LOL Funny how time just fly's by. Man you hated some Bush...... and R's too. You sure you ever voted for the R's?
