For the record, today was the day that the United States officially ran smack into its debt ceiling of $31.4 trillion. Admittedly, the US Treasury Department has developed an assortment of tricks, called “extraordinary measures,” to keep the debate over what to do going until approximately June of this year. At that point, Wily Coyote is scheduled to look down and realize there’s nothing underneath him.
The 1995 brawl over the debt ceiling was $26.5 trillion dollars ago. Then, the $4.9 trillion debt was officially less than 65% of the reported GDP. Today, it is at 120% of a greatly inflated GDP. It took the first 16 years to add another $11 trillion, when in 2011 Standard & Poor’s downgraded the US credit rating from AAA to AA+.
In 2013, Congress stopped raising the debt ceiling, having invented the ruse of simply suspending it. The ceiling was reimposed recently, with another $15.5 trillion having been added over the last dozen years, almost doubling the national debt. That’s over one thousand billion dollars per year. Having a debate over such an unredeemable debt, while more and more of the world moves out of the dollar, may keep some folks up at night.
