9/21/08: Why I'm worried about the bailout

OK, I’m getting worried about where all this bailout money is coming from – guess what, it comes out of your pocket, via the NATIONAL DEBT. In Bush’s time alone the debt has skyrocketed from less than 6 trillion dollars to 11.2 trillion dollars now, and looks set for more. We may well be paying a trillion dollars a year just to pay the interest on the debt soon.

I found this great site with some of the easiest to understand charts of the economy I’ve seen – here’s one example of our national debt since WWII:

http://home.comcast.net/~andy_dunn/budget_main.html#national_defense

Notice how it stays steady for over 30 years after WWII, but then starts to shoot up after 1980? Not a coincidence, welcome, my friends, to Reaganomics – which has become the mantra of the Republican economic policy ever since. To summarize (yes, I’ll get hammered for this, but here goes): talk big about reducing government while at the same time putting in the biggest spending increases ever seen, and don’t forget to help all our wealthy friends in oil, defense and finance, meantime appeasing the American public with talk of tax cuts (mostly for the rich), which by the way, the people pay for anyway since we’re just going to add it to the national debt, which they don’t understand anyway!!

Since Reagan, the only time the debt flattened out or actually started to go down was under Clinton, but with Dubya Bush we’re back to the spending spree again, the likes of which have never been seen before!!

There are many other excellent charts at this site that are well worth taking a gander at. Bottom line is, our economic crisis is not due to a lack in productivity- au contraire, the GDP (and the GDP per person) continues to rise steadily year after year (Americans are working harder, not less), but because of profligate, out-of-spending by our government, particularly under Republican Presidents.

Here’s a clearer picture of this:

http://www.lafn.org/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html

I also looked into who owns the National Debt – who are we actually paying all the interest to? Turns out that a big chunk is to our Federal Reserve Bank, which contrary to popular thinking, is not an arm of the Bush Administration, although it sure seems that way now.

http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/2007/08/an-800-billion-.html

Foreign ownership of America is perhaps more visible when a Japanese company buys the Rockefeller Center or Columbia Pictures, or a British company buys Greyhound (did you know that? I didn’t), but the truth is much more subtle and dangerous – to us and to the world economy – nearly a fourth of our national debt is owed to foreign countries or corporations; about a fifth of it or about 1.5 TRILLION dollars is owed to just Japan, China, UK and OPEC. You’re worried about our economy now? If China and our “friends” who export oil (mostly Middle East countries but including Russia & Venezuela) decide to call in their money, you will have seen nothing yet. No, it won’t happen, because they like their money too, and if our economy tanks, they’re not getting their money back either. But it’s not a happy situation that America is increasingly beholden to foreign entities.