Tornado Alley (PROG)

[SilverSurfer]

wbmw, to most people, talk of the U.S. government debt doesn't have much impact.

For instance, we could tell a man on the street, the annual funding costs of our national debt are approaching $4 trillion per year – that's $1.5 trillion in new annual deficits, plus $2 trillion-$3 trillion a year in short-term obligations coming due that need to be refinanced. Foreigners hold roughly half of this debt. Thus, we have about $2 trillion in foreign debt that must be repaid or refinanced each year. But this obligation is so large that it's meaningless to most people. Or we could say that $2 trillion is 20% of our GDP, but even then, most people won't understand just how much money this is. So think of it this way...

If you spent $1 million per day from the time of the founding of Rome – roughly 2,700 years ago – until today, you would have accumulated about $1 trillion in debt. Now, double that amount. And that's the size of our annual foreign borrowing obligation.

(Thanks to Eric Margolis for the trillion-dollar metaphor. See his essay "Spending America Into Ruin".)

Even with Snowbama hope and change, can we fulfill the promises made to our citizens and continue to prop up and bail out Big Business?