Can you see a trend?

Ed Steer wrap-up.

Not one penny of US Treasury debt has been repaid for 51 years - the last time that US government funded debt actually decreased on a year-to-year basis was 1960. Ninety-seven percent of today’s funded Treasury debt total has been accumulated since August 1971. Sixty percent of it has been added in the past decade. Forty percent of it has been added since the first signs of the Great Financial Crisis emerged in early 2007. - Bill Buckler, The Privateer...10 July 2011

Comment:

I think we all know what event happened in 1971 to start this ``slide down the slippery slope``, and the reason the U.S. (and the rest of the world) continues on down this slope is summed up in this article, also from today’s Ed Steer’s page.

``Something More Important than the Debt Limit``

It is not the debt capacity of the US government that is of primary importance, nor how much will be cut from proposed federal spending over the next ten years. There is something fundamental at stake here and much more important to the future of the US. It will be made clear by the outcome of budget cuts, if any are finally made. It is, namely, the adversative relationship between the country’s public and private sectors, or to put it bluntly, the tax-eaters versus tax-payers.

Additional Comment:

To sum up the real problem, imo, is this snippet from another of Ed`s articles today.

This is absolutely no different from what mafia groups in New York used to (and probably still do) do for public contracts – the proverbial five families would get together, divide up the boroughs and neighbourhoods between them, and each family would individually buy or intimidate their way into the bidding process, corrupting the game so that the public had to overpay for their garbage collection or their construction labour or whatever. The only difference here is that we’re talking about debt, not garbage. But the concept is exactly the same; it’s the same crime.

Good Luck to all!