Posts Tagged ‘debt-to-GDP ratio’

Move Over Greece. Obama Taking America To Bankruptcy: U.S. Debt-To-GDP Now Exceeds 100 Percent While Obama Spends $2.52 To Get Us A Lousy Dollar

April 30, 2012

At the moment I accessed the U.S. national debt clock, our public debt was listed at $15,689,952 trillion (as of 3:33 pm PST, April 27).

The most current figure I could find for the U.S. GDP as expressed in dollars was $15,609,697 trillion (International Monetary Fund).

And … we’re officially Greece, thank you very much.  Because that gives us a debt-to-GDP ratio of 100.5% by my calculation based on those figures.

Tyler Durden has a slightly different figure (100.8%) which is clearly based on slightly different figures.  The numbers are exploding upward so damn fast no human being can keep track of them, anyway:

Big GDP Miss: 2.2% Vs Expectations Of 2.5%, Composition Even Uglier
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/27/2012 08:41 -0400

So much for the +3.0% GDP whisper number. Instead of printing at the expected number of +2.5%, the first preliminary GDP data point (two more revisions pending) came out at 2.2%, a big disappointment for a quarter which had a substantial boost from the weather. And while of the 2.2%, Personal Consumption came in strong – as expected, as it was precisely the factor most impacted by pulling in demand forward courtesy of “April in February”, 0.59% of the 2.2% was an increase in inventories, something which was not supposed to happen as it means that the quality of the economic growth in Q1 was far worse than expected. Cementing the ugly composition of Q1 GDP was fixed investment which added just a paltry 0.18% – this is the number which is critical for ongoing cashflow generation and unfortunately, the very low print means that growth outlook for Q2 is now even worse than before and we expect economists will promptly trim their already bearish predictions for Q2 GDP. Finally, government “consumption” subtracted just 0.6% from the total number, a decrease from the 0.84% in Q4, which means that once again the government is starting to become less of a detractor to growth – a dagger in the heart to anyone who claims there is “quality” in GDP growth. And the number you have all been waiting for: At March 31, US Debt/GDP was 100.8%.

Now, the fact that our debt-to-GDP ratio now exceeds 100 percent is bad, really, really bad.  But it’s actually an awful lot worse: because as this quarter’s economic report shows we are adding debt at such a massive level compared to our GDP that it isn’t even funny.

Durden also has a chart that shows just how vast is the Obamanomics discrepancy between massive government spending and meager GDP based on the numbers from the latest GDP report out April 27 (see it put into quick perspective here):

That’s right: the great big giant red bar is Obama’s spending.  The tiny little blue bar is our gross national product.  Obama is foolishly spending massively to give us next to nothing by way of return.

Let me describe this with a picture: the great big giant sumo wrestler is Obama’s spending and the debt it is generating; the little tiny kid is Obama’s economic performance:

Who do you think is going to win (I know liberals will say that Obama is lean and wiry and he’ll take the giant out with his lofty rhetoric)???

Obama is taking the American people $2.52 deeper into debt so he can boast about the dollar he “gained” for us.

And that super-massive 252 percent discrepancy between Obama’s spending and Obama’s GDP guarantees that America is on it’s way to a quick collapse.  You’ve simply got to be demon possessed to believe that this is sustainable (which is why I now understand that “Democrat Party” is shorthand for “Demonic Bureaucrat Party”).

Here’s another chart which essentially measures the rate of our spending that gets really, truly frightening when you consider its implications:

Remember how Obama viciously demonized George Bush over his debt ceiling increase?  Only to himself push through the three highest debt ceiling increases in the entire history of the human race?

What is frightening is that everybody agrees that Bush’s spending was insane.  If you put an angle measure up to that chart, you will see that the angle during the Bush presidency increases at a 50 degree slope.  Democrats demonized Bush for his spending and conservatives agreed that it was beyond crazy.  But now do the same thing to Obama’s spending: and Oh my God it is at 80 degrees.  Ninety degrees is straight up.  WE ARE ALMOST HEADING STRAIGHT UP to a very explosive ending followed by a very long descent into the fish food genre. 

The level and extent of Obama’s failure is simply staggering.  We are going to die.  And it’s going to be a very painful death at that.

And the only possible way to at least prolong that coming agony is to get this disgrace out of our damn White House.  Because next term he’s going to kill us.

If it wasn’t so pathetic, it would actually be kind of funny.  If this was Russia or China or Iran or North Korea, I would be laughing my ass of at these numbers.  But it’s us – and it is our enemies who are laughing their asses off at our expense.

Obama Massively Underestimates His Deficit; And By The Way, Federal Debt Will Raise To 90% Of GDP

March 26, 2010

Good afternoon, America.  You each owe $10,000 more than the government thought you did yesterday.  Hope that doesn’t bother anybody.

Barack Obama is leading the United States of America straight down to hell.  And it will be completely broke and massively in debt when we get there:

CBO report: Debt will rise to 90% of GDP
Friday, March 26, 2010
By David M. Dickson

President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president’s budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade
.

“An additional $1.2 trillion in debt dumped on [GDP] to our children makes a huge difference,” said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That represents an additional debt of $10,000 per household above and beyond the federal debt they are already carrying.”

The federal public debt, which was $6.3 trillion ($56,000 per household) when Mr. Obama entered office amid an economic crisis, totals $8.2 trillion ($72,000 per household) today, and it’s headed toward $20.3 trillion (more than $170,000 per household) in 2020, according to CBO’s deficit estimates.

That figure would equal 90 percent of the estimated gross domestic product in 2020, up from 40 percent at the end of fiscal 2008. By comparison, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio peaked at 109 percent at the end of World War II, while the ratio for economically troubled Greece hit 115 percent last year.

“That level of debt is extremely problematic, particularly given the upward debt path beyond the 10-year budget window,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

For countries with debt-to-GDP ratios “above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by 1 percent, and average growth falls considerably more,” according to a recent research paper by economists Kenneth S. Rogoff of Harvard and Carmen M. Reinhart of the University of Maryland.

CBO projected the 2011 deficit will be $1.34 trillion, not much different from the administration’s estimate of $1.27 trillion. However, CBO’s estimate of the 2020 deficit at $1.25 trillion significantly exceeds the administration’s $1 trillion estimate.

Just so you know, a few things were different at the end of World War II than they are now.  For one thing, who held the U.S. debt back then?  The American people, who had purchased savings bonds, war bonds, and the like.  When the government began paying those debts with interest, it was paying American citizens who invested that money back in the U.S. economy.

Not so now.  Now we owe China and Japan and other foreign countries.  It’s foreign investment; and foreigners will reap the rewards at our children’s expense.

A second thing is a corollary to the first.  We used to be a nation of savers.  Now we’re a nation of spenders.  We’ve got no resources saved up for tough times.  The moment we have an economic slowdown, people can’t pay their mortgages or their bills and everything goes to hell.

Third, we actually PRODUCED something at the end of WW II.  In fact, we were the most productive nation with the most powerful industrial base in the history of the world back then.  Now?  We basically don’t build anything any more.  Now our economy is based primarily on consuming what others build.

And fourth, that apex of debt at the end of WWII occurred BECAUSE of WWII.  We went into debt because of a war against the most evil regimes in the history of the planet.  And after we won that war, we went back to normal, and started quickly bringing our debt level down.

Now it’s just the opposite.  Our debt level is skyrocketing, but it isn’t do to a historic event; it’s just do to the fact that our government consists of spending addicts and we’re spending and spending and spending with no responsibility to the present or foresight for the future.

We are so screwed.  We WILL have a Great Depression that will make the last one look like a Love Boat cruise.  The only question is how far we can string our insanity along until reality takes over and we implode.

And what does our current administration have to say about it?

How ’bout if we spend a few trillion more taking over the health care system?