The sad truth is that we likely have understated just how dire our economic situation is, and will become.
Here's a good piece about the coming debt iceberg that involves our newly acquired government-owned auto companies.
Key graph:
Make no mistake, these companies are still on life support. The CBO expects that the lion's share of the government's losses on TARP will come, not from anything the Bush administration did, but from the Obama administration's decision to bail out the automakers and to a lesser extent, its bailout of homeowners. It seems that a big chunk of our cost may come from picking up the gold plated pensions . . . "Cadillac Plans", if you will . . . of the automakers. And lest you think I'm picking on unions over management, it was management that used the UAW as a prop to extract these gargantuan sums from the pockets of innocent taxpayers.
And if that's not enough, here's an article about how several states have fared with their state-run health care plans.
Key graphs:
Defenders of the program argue that it's not really a budget buster because the state's budget was already in trouble. But for those worried about ObamaCare's potential effects on the federal budget, that's hardly comforting. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has warned that, without significant change, the U.S. fiscal situation is "unsustainable," with publicly held debt likely to reach a potentially destabilizing 90 percent of GDP by 2020. Democrats managed to get the CBO to score ObamaCare as a net reduction in the deficit, but those projections are tremendously uncertain at best. As Alan Greenspan warned last weekend, if the CBO's estimates are wrong, the consequences could be "severe".
The history of health coverage expansion should make us worry. If ObamaCare's actual fiscal effects look anything like previous efforts to expand health coverage, the federal budget is in for a world of hurt.
This is irresponsible government spending on such a massive scale that there simply is no historical precedent. “Trillions” have supplanted “Billions”, even as unemployment continues to rise.
What we are seeing is no less political malpractice, and those that have brought us to this point seem oblivious to the mortal wound that may well have inflicted upon the economic health of our republic.
We are being destroyed from within, and being made increasingly more vulnerable from without.
Personally, I look to the future with mounting dread.
2 comments:
I have a bit of good news. The Vatican has made peace with the Beatles over John Lennon's Jesus remark.
Praise be to Iranian clerics! They have found that scanily clad women are to blame for earthquakes!
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