Music video about the National Debt

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Nice production values.

One minor quibble, that probably doesn't make a big difference. At the end when you add some bullet points about the debt,,, What do you mean by "Foreign" debt? Is that a fraction of total government debt held by foreigners?  I don't know what that spread is. While the Chinese and other foreign sovereign investment funds hold a lot of our debt, the fed also is buying a fraction of our debt issuances (funny money- borrowing from ourselves?).

AFAIK our total government (sovereign) debt is around $50k+ per individual, not per household.  For per household it is between 2 and 3 times that. I've seen $140k used for per household.  (Divide $16.5T current debt limit, by 300 million for a rough per person number.).

If you really want to have fun, start adding up the unfunded and off budget liabilities, per person. It is several times that official debt number. If $50k is scary the real number (counting other liabilities) is really scary.

Of course that keeps going up every time we calculate it.

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When I was at the gym the other day in the locker room complaining with some other old farts about the out of control spending, I mentioned that if I was a younger person I would really be pissed off, because they will get stuck with this debt. My eyes met with a young adult who wasn't part of our whine session, but could hear us, and he nodded his head in agreement.

I wish the young adults today were more aware and vocal about what is going on...  Maybe they are and I just don't see/hear them.

JR
 
That's precisely what that number is John, *foreign-held* debt, per household, not all debt per person. Some really astonishing things came from researching this video. Stumbled upon a book from 1912 called US Money Versus Corporation Currency. Historic book!! It examines how the banks came to essentially control Washington. Page 257 in that book, it is public domain now, sums up the whole thing. The fed got hooked on a plan on nursing on the teat the banks, never actually paying debts down.

And then you print money to make things worse. The price on a gallon of milk has almost quadrupled in the past few years. Just one symbol of a devaluation of our currency.

Yes there are young people waking up, which is the driving force behind making the video. Trying to get lots of people to see it.
 
I'm not sure "foreign" held is an extremely important distinction, while it does suggest that the capital is less sticky. A large percentage of the Japanese (2.5x GDP) sovereign debt was held by Japanese nationals, but even that friendly capital will leave town, when it looks like the debt may implode under it's own mass. World debt markets are closely linked. The US housing bubble, was exported around the world and the collapse likewise was felt all around the world.
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I have discussed banking before and the system of fractional reserve banking is a double edged sword. The ability to re-lend bank deposit capital multiple times, supercharges economic growth (growth is generally a good thing). However that growth comes with a cost, as in price instability, so higher growth but with boom/bust cycles.

The Fed was established precisely because the congress could not be trusted with interest rate decisions (the gas pedal for the money supply and indirectly the economy), but the Fed seems pretty conflicted having to report to congress regularly, and being funded by congress, so congress could starve them. At the moment the Fed is doing a manly job of trying to prevent deflation, but have severely distorted the free market. The relatively hot stock market in recent years is a direct result of the Fed expanding the money supply, and holding interest rates artificially low, so perhaps another bubble. If you can't earn a decent return on savings, and are afraid of housing, dividend paying stocks look pretty attractive. Housing has been looking attractive to me for a while (I've been telling a young friend to buy for a year now), but he like others are still gun shy from experiencing the recent housing bubble (he got burned and had to short sale out of a house he owned, because he was upside down in it and needed to move to change jobs.).

These days it certainly looks like Bernanke is giving congress cover to not clean up their taxing/spending act, by driving the anemic (2%) economic growth and moderating unemployment, with his hyper expanded money supply through quantitative easing, buying back government securities, and near zero interest rates.

Another thing that is making it different this time is the tighter linkage between international economies, thanks (or no-thanks) to globalization. So gone are the days when one country could game their currency for trade advantage. Nowadays even Switzerland is printing money, in an Alice in Wonderland attempt to run as fast as it can to stay in the same (relative) place. Japan has recently thrown down the money printing gauntlet, trying to talk down their Yen.

Of course maybe I'm, all wrong.... and this is far from a perfect system when it is working well. At the moment is it not working very well.

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Good luck, every generation has to step up at some point and become the adults. The Boomers have not left a very good legacy, and the current trajectory looks unsustainable (to me). At some point either we step up and stop the out of control spending, or our lenders will do it "to" us.

I remain impressed by how much debt this administration has managed to roll up in a brief time, but this deficit spending is not uniquely a democrat behavior, they just seem more aggressive about it.

JR

PS: Perhaps another bullet point showing the total debt per household of around $140k... or not. The big numbers are too large to grasp and seem abstract even to politicians, so reducing them down to per-person or per-household is a powerful tool to help communicate the scope of the debt and spending in personal terms. I also like the comparison of total debt to total GDP for useful perspective, regarding our aggregate ability to service and pay down that debt. 
 

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