If the US Government were a family & their household income was $55,000 per year, they’d actually be spending $96,500 — $41,500 more than they made! That means they’re spending 175% of their annual income! So, in 2011 they’d add $41,500 of debt to their current credit card debt of $366,000! – Dave Ramsey
The federal government now has a deficit of over $14,500,000,000,000. Many people are saying we have to solve the problem by ‘generating revenue’ through increased taxes. Take a look at how much EVERYONE in the US makes:
Go ahead and add up all those bars, and lets say we tax 100% of the income from 100% of the people. That is still not enough to fix the problem!
This is a spending problem!
Raising taxes might help a little, but you can’t solve this problem by taxing people. Taxing people is not ‘generating revenue’, it is taking wealth from a productive person and doing something else with it. The problem is we are spending too much money. Simple right?
Now for the real problem(s):
- Very few government officials are interested in dealing with the real problem. (should be obvious now that you’ve seen the argument and RESULT of the recent debit ceiling debate)
- Even if they were interested in dealing with the problems, they don’t have the backbone or the brains to resolve the problem.
- Most US citizens think cutting government costs are a good idea, until they get to the cuts that affect them; so as a whole, every government program is ‘off the table’.
So here we are, the problem is simple to define but hard to solve!
Mike w/ the NTTP has more information in his recent post Downgrade Causes and Fallout, and many interesting graphs posted on his facebook page.