Your Take: US Credit Limit Raised Again
When President Bush took office the national debt was $5.6 trillion. That’s right, five trillion, six hundred billion dollars. That’s $5,600,000,000,000.00 in debt. Yesterday, the Senate voted 53-42 to raise the credit limit for the fifth time in the Bush Presidency to $9.815 trillion dollars. 9,815,000,000,000.00 is how much debt the United States is allowed. Isn’t that absolutely staggering?
What makes this absolutely hilarious is the fact that all these lawmakers went absolutely nuts about the “subprime meltdown.” Oh, so when the banks were offering credit to people who had absolutely no right getting that credit, it was a travesty. When we discovered that these borrowers couldn’t pay the debt back, we needed consider bailing them out because they were the victims of predatory lenders. But, when the government can’t control its spending and is about to hit its limit, they can just raise it by, oh, eight hundred and fifty billion dollars. I wonder if any other country is going to bail out the United States when we discover we can’t possibly pay it back. It’s predatory lending!
Thoughts?
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There are 10 comments, add your thoughts now!
you’re absolutely right, it’s subprime lending. even if the US can pay back it’s debt, is that really how we want to be living? do we really want to spend most of budget paying debt???
Well, we want more services, and less taxes. Just like we want more junk around the house but not to have to work harder to afford it. Maybe the U.S. government, just like most of us, needs to figure out its priorities and cut all the excess spending. Just like people who have let their lifestyle get out of control, those cuts are going to hurt for a while, but we’ll be financially healthier in the long run.
Jim,
You’re right, this is staggering. Wouldn’t it be nice every time the consumer, whether it be business or individual, maxed out their credit we could just say, “oh my, I think I’ll raise my credit limit”!.
This is so problematic on so many fronts it is mind blowing. And the worst problem is, one day our debts will come due. What happens then?
Russ
I’m going to be somewhat contrarian on this issue.
Go take a gander at The Skeptical Optimist sometime. He provides a completely different economic/monetary viewpoint than virtually anyone else in the media — and he makes sense, most of the time.
We provide bonds for anyone to buy at certain interest rates. We continue to be able to more than pay for the interest on those bonds. And China isn’t our biggest borrower, as many in politics or the media would have you think.
The irony is that all the fiscal conservatives voted for Bush in 2000. They watched spending go up. And then in 2004, what did they do? They voted for Bush.
We can muster up all the outrage that we want, but the truth is we brought this upon ourselves.
Well, since we basically owe the money to ourselves, let’s just call it even and wha-la, no more debt! ^_^
Sure, we can just write off the entire debt. As long as we don’t mind a complete economic collapse after the least risky securities become the highest risk.
Basically every man, woman and child’s share of this debt went from about $18K in 2000 to $32K today (and your dollar is worth less than Canada’s now). Hope you chose some extremely wise investments for that $300 check Bush sent you.
The only solution is to revert back to the tax rates of the 90’s and get back to the Clinton surplus.
What is the point of this allowable deficit number? If the US runs out of money, are they going to just stop spending?
Btw, who does the credit checks?
[...] wants your thoughts on the United States’ deficit. - Yeah, it’s bad but I got to say that Clinton’s rosy outlook on the debt came prior [...]
to chris:
most of our debt is owned by foreign countries (like China). when/if they call these long term notes, the US will have to come up with money somehow. the US is merely anticipating that the chinese will never call the notes because they know that if they did so, our economy would collapse leading to a huge negative impact on the global markets. its all a game and there is no problem as long as every country plays by the “rules”. very stupid and risky IMO
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