Do these numbers matter? <\/a>\u00a0If not, why bother keeping track of them?<\/p>\nTreasury Department says that for the month of September (one month only) Social Security and other payroll taxes took in $96 billion, but Social Security and Medicare cost $158 billion, about three times as much as we spent on the entire Defense budget.\u00a0 Are we buying so many beans that we can\u2019t afford bullets?<\/p>\n
For fiscal year 2017, we ended up being short $666 billion.\u00a0 That\u2019s not the total amount of debt owed, nor the total amount of future spending promised, it\u2019s the amount we overdrew the checkbook at the end of the fiscal year. \u00a0We borrowed money to make the books balance.\u00a0 Our loan balance is now $20,000,000,000,000.00. \u00a0It goes up a million dollars a minute.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s be serious: it\u2019s simply not mathematically possible to pay America\u2019s debts in any reasonable amount of time while maintaining any reasonable level of taxation and therefore we can safely conclude they will never be paid.\u00a0 One of two things will happen:\u00a0 we\u2019ll default and cause a world economic crisis; or we\u2019ll convert to electronic money not backed by any tangible asset so the computers can continue to transfer electrons as if they were money and nobody will care that the entire thing is a polite fiction.<\/p>\n
Maybe in the future we\u2019ll run things as they did on Star Trek \u2013 money simply appears, just like your lunch shows up in the replicator machine or the red-shirted guy beams up from the planet.\u00a0 Magic.<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Our federal government makes me feel like a redshirt all.\u00a0 The.\u00a0 Time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Do these numbers matter? \u00a0If not, why bother keeping track of them? Treasury Department says that for the month of September (one month only) Social Security and other payroll taxes took in $96 billion, but Social Security and Medicare cost $158 billion, about three times as much as we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberal-tyranny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64972"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64974,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64972\/revisions\/64974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}