Tornado Alley (PROG)

[wall_rus]

Not sure I understand. Just as in a household budget, money spent on credit card interest doesn't improve your life. It's money down a rathole, imo, especially when the money was spent on questionable items.

http://www.designverb.com/2008/01/04/how-315-billion-dollars-look-like/

What 2 years of interest payments could buy or pay for:

Belgium (with all the chocolate factories and breweries included) + Holland (with all the coffee shops included) + Luxembourg (with all its banks included) and you'd still have spare change.
Exxon Mobile AND General Electric
700,000 Bugatti Veyron's
43,750,000 VW Golf's (my car), or I could fill up my car 14,000,000,000 times and drive 3,864,000,000,000 miles which would allow me to drive to the sun and back ... 20,700 times!
Another Irak-like war (Iran anybody?)
70,000 Large Hadron Colliders
700 Billion is just slightly less than the GDP of Africa Continent, the whole continent, all 54 countries.

We could buy 3.5 billion One Laptop Per Child machines. Want world peace and understanding? Give one to every Muslim on earth and every citizen of China (or since China can afford them, make that everyone in India or everyone in Africa and South America combined) and you’d still have more than 500 million machines left over.

Or we could give 4.4 million Americans free college educations at private institutions. We could give 23 million Americans free college educations at public institutions like mine. That alone would improve our competitive position and transform dying industries.

It would reimburse banks, home owners, and local governments for nearly 9 million foreclosures - It could prevent over 200 million foreclosures - It could buy 8.6 billion monthly Metrocards - The government could rebuild Katrina-ravished New Orleans and Gulf Coast … three and a half times - Roughly 538 Yankee Stadiums could be built - 5.4 million students could be sent to a public university - It equals nearly 520 times the amount of Amtrak’s current operating budget - It is $14 billion more than the U.S. spent during the Vietnam War
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As a response to your, "his broader point is, I think, well enough taken"

How Much Debt Can The United States Handle?
By Carmen Dellutri, Attorney at Law on Jan 7, 2009 in Economy, Personal Finance
This morning I woke up and the first thing that I heard was that the Federal Government has started purchasing troubled mortgages to ease the credit crisis. Well, if it were that easy, we should have did it several months ago. Now I feel much better that the Federal Government is going to start helping people. Wait a minute, are they really helping people or helping financial institutions again? The blank checks just keep on getting issued. I believe that the Federal Government has either spent or guaranteed over seven (7) trillion dollars of debt already. Of course, that number will never be shown to the American public.

My biggest fear is not what the Federal Government is doing, it is how are we going to pay all of this back? Unless you have been living under a rock, you should remember that the United States already maintained a nine (9) trillion dollar debt. At nine (9) trillion dollars, we couldn’t pay this debt back in 30 years. Let’s do the math. Assuming you had nine (9) trillion dollars owed on your credit card and your credit card company said: “we will waive the interest (Hopefully, the Asian countries that carry our debts will waive the interest one day), just pay us back a billion dollars a day.” At first you think, that’s great, we can have an interest free loan, and then you wake up and realize that neither your credit card company or any Asian country is going to waive the interest. So, for our example only, let’s waive the interest. At a billion dollars a day, how long would it take to pay back nine (9) trillion dollars. Hmmm, at 365 days a year, that would be 365 billion dollars a year. So, it would take two and one-half years to pay back a trillion. So, for nine (9) trillion dollars that would take approximately 27 years. Ok, now I am concerned.

This analysis comes with some assumptions. First, that the United States doesn’t borrow any more money. Second, that we can pay it back at the rate of one billion dollars a day. Third, that the Asian countries will waive any and all interest. This last assumption is clearly a fallacy.

Now, if we add an additional nine (9) trillion dollars to that debt load, we are going to either default on the debt or do some fancy work on the books. I wish they made a calculator for numbers that big. Then I could figure out what my fair share is. So, without going into too much detail, we are going to be in debt for a very long time. So my questions are: Can the United States survive without foreign capital? Can the United States service the debt we already have? Can we service twice that amount? If we incur an additional 9 trillion dollars in debt to deal with this recession, will it be worth it when all is said and done? How can you justify bankrupting our Country to deal with a recession?