Interest

Average student loan debt in New Hampshire is more than $33,000, and the national total is now $1.5 trillion.   But it’s those same young college graduates who will bear the burden of our national debt, now $21 trillion, up from just $2.5 trillion in 1988.  The debt doubled to $5 … [read more]

It Wouldn’t Cost Anything At All

The United States spends as much government money on health care as do the socialized health care systems of Europe.  States and our federal government now spend nearly two trillion dollars a year on health care.  That’s more, as a % of GDP, than Canada and the U.K. spend on … [read more]

Fairness

The rising cost of health care is driving more and more citizens into Medicaid, the program for the poor. Medicaid, in turn, drives up the cost of health care by under-paying doctors. HealthAffairs.org says that it doesn’t even pay half of the discount price that your insurance company would pay. A survey of thousands of physicians, by CNN, reveals that Medicaid only covers 50% – 70% of their costs of providing care. … [read more]

$20 Trillion!

The federal debt is now larger than Twenty Trillion Dollars.  That’s $124,000 per American, if you’re counting just the younger half of the population. The older half of the population has benefited from the growth of the debt—we paid lower taxes and got more services, for decades—and we won’t have to pay it back.  So it’s younger Americans who will bear the brunt, and they’re beginning to notice. … [read more]

Facts and Figures

The debt-clock number you see in the upper-right-hand corner of this page is the federal debt, according to conventional accounting.  You can make it look smaller by counting only the debt that the government owes to the public, and not the debt (held by the Federal Reserve and the “trust funds”) that it is effectively cancelled because the government owes the money to itself. … [read more]

Welfare for The Middle Class

“The U.S. program that pays elderly Americans’ hospital bills will exhaust reserves in 2028, two years sooner than last year’s estimate, trustees of the program said on Wednesday.”
— Reuters. … [read more]

Upward Mobility

“Switzerland will decide on June 5 whether to pay its citizens a basic income to replace welfare benefits … Economists like it because unlike welfare benefits, basic income does not phase out if people work. As a result, there is no abrupt disincentive at various income levels the way there is with so many government assistance programs.”
— Chris Low, Chief Economist, FTN Financial. … [read more]

The Rest of the Story

Miley Cyrus was scratched by a cat. A man tickled two girls on a playground slide, and he didn’t even know the girls.  TV newsrooms judged that these recent stories were more important than world crises, voter anxiety and rebellion, student debt, or the federal debt. … [read more]

An Irresistible Force

In the upper left corner of this page you’ll see a pretty little girl wearing a sign saying that she’s $38,375 in debt.  That number is now $57,764, if you’re willing to use the Enron accounting standards of the federal government, which don’t acknowledge that she’s carrying liability for Social Security promises that we can’t pay.  Medicare is actually much worse, but this year the Social Security Administration is sending out benefit statements—estimates of how much you’ll get per month when you retire—that say: … [read more]