I was interviewed yesterday by Press TV on the record setting national debt. The old Roman saying in the headline for this blog occurred me to after the interview finished but oh bother. You can hear the early morning monologue by clicking here. And here are some outtakes from the interview:
“The debt load is far more dangerous than it appears especially as far as the government debt and the government guaranteed debt,” James Bovard from The Future of Freedom Foundation told Press TV in a phone interview Tuesday.
“President Obama has sent our national debt into the stratosphere and he’s been doing for programs that have done not nothing to boost American productivity and are not going to make the US a better place or a more prosperous place in the decades to come,” he added.
Latest economic data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve showed that the government, businesses and people in the United States were $59.4 trillion in debt at the end of the first quarter of 2014.
“There are a lot of ways the US government is encouraging Americans to have bad financial habits. Folks can write off their interest payments on their tax returns which basically is a government incentive – almost a subsidy — for people to borrow more money and spend more money that they have,” Bovard said.
[image reposted from libertyjuice.com]
On Twitter @jimbovard
And then there’s the whole tangent of how that debt benefits the cronies of the State as well. With a side order of “would colleges really be getting that much for tuition to pay bloated admin costs if lenders weren’t assured that students, suddenly discovering that a degree in Advanced Underwater Basket Weaving was unmarketable, were able to use the bankruptcy code to discharge their unrepayable debts.
But if we treated education debt like other debts, how would people ever get schooled?
Good point. We don’t want a nation where a fifth of the high school graduates can’t read, and 14% of the nation are illiterate overall (with functional illiteracy even higher), which is what happened when schooling is left up to the individual and his family.
No.
Wait.
My bad.
Those are the CURRENT numbers, with schooling MANDATED by the State, and with the State being in charge of the schooling it mandates.
Anyway – I think that people who take on six figure debts to have degrees in Mynority Wymyn’s Stydies *will* be schooled. It just won’t be the formal book-related sort of schooling.
Jim,
To hell with the Romans. What do they know compared to our Neocons and their plutocratic supporters on Wall Street?
Rest easy, the New Masters of the Universe have a plan that will spare us. Another war in the Middle East in Iraq along with a skirmish in Ukraine will open the horn of plenty! Remember that no less than Cheney the Great told us that “debt doesn’t matter” and by gare, he proved in the second time around in Iraq. We simply put it on the charge card provided by the Chinese. This proves the US really is “exceptional”, as being the only nation in history to have ever done this.
Yep – thus far our rulers have not cornered the market on prudence in this new Millennium.
I submit the National Debt is a confidence game that was established by the Federal Reserve in 1913 that currently embezzles $4 billion daily –7/52– from the U.S. government using the auction accounts of Treasury securities exclusively handled by the FRBNY. The accounts have never had disbursements audited or reported to Congress as required by law.
Ref. jhttp://ppjg.me/2014/06/11/who-benefits-from-deficit-spending/#more-30510