OK, so now Drudge was recently also going off about the budget deficit. Many people are confused about the deficit vs. the public debt. Well it's this simple: Say from my post of yesterday you know you owe in debt $63k but you make $80k/yr. All well and good. That $63k is your debt, and is the equivalent of our gov't debt in my "essay" of yesterday.

Now the "federal deficit" is the amount the fed. govt is overspending for any given year. So if you are making $80k and you actually have a budget, that budget would be a plan for spending more than $80k/yr. (If you are servicing $63k in debt, well, that'd be understandable, wouldn't it?) That is pretty much what we are doing here.

Wikipedia discusses the 2009 US Federal Budget here. For 2009, $2.7 trillion are the total receipts (est.). Total spending (est.) is $3.1 trillion, which assumes total "discretionary spending" is in place. So if all "discretionary spending" is spent, our budget deficit for 2009 is (was) $0.2 trillion, or 200,000,000,000 (ie, $200 billion).

Note under "Mandatory Spending", the entry:
$260 billion - Interest on National Debt

That is just over 1/4th of $1 trillion. Back to the 2006 GDP figure for the US of $16 trillion, that would be 1.56% [math: ((.25 * (1/16))*100)] of our entire GDP is being used to service our national debt. We pay only a very small part of our GDP to the gov't in taxes though, since we actually need it to... live on. This amt. of any nation's GDP being spent on bond-driven debt is just insane.

OK, now, back to "discretionary spending". Look at the list; does that look like it's "discretionary" to you?

No wonder there is further talk of "raising the deficit limit" on the federal government's budget.

2/1/10: UPDATE:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100201/ap_on_bi_ge/us_budget

'WASHINGTON – Spelling out painful priorities, President Barack Obama urged Congress on Monday to quickly approve a huge new shot of spending for recession relief and job creation, part of a record $3.8 trillion budget that would boost the deficit beyond any in the nation's history while only slowly beginning to put Americans back to work.

If Congress goes along with Obama's election-year plan, the nation would still end the year with unemployment pushing double digits at 9.8 percent and this year's pool of government red ink deepening to $1.56 trillion — by the administration's accounting.'

Honestly now, the math escapes me. I am not sure what to do with all these new numbers. I just know this: it's a lot more red ink than even I had at first seen.

----

And not to shift gears to fast, but did you see this?: WEF Security Officer Dies in Probable Suicide, District Says

I don't believe this for a second.

Admittedly, I have come up with some real entertaining ideas. Recently though a friend of my family's whom we have known in excess of 20 years was "politely amused" at my suggestion that the US is facing some stresses that are potentially life-threatening for it, and that these are largely financial and of our own making rather than due to anything pressing on us from outside of ourselves. So in the middle of a software upgrade (which is like watching grass grow: 99% nothing and 1% doing something), I made my case. I decided to post it here since I have posted nothing of substance (unless you call videos substantial which... well, maybe they are) in some time. Here is a copy of my latest diatribe for those who care to read it:

Date: 1/25/10
Subject: Campbell on the US Fed debt and the next 40 years

Dear [Redacted]:

See http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Figures-on-government-apf-2178072020.html?x=0&.v=2

[In 000,000s]:
Total public debt outstanding Jan. 22: $12,302,465

That's 12,302,465,000,000, or: "12 trillion, 302 billion, 465 million dollars".

Now that is US gov't DEBT - just DEBT. The US's GDP in 2006 (ie, gross domestic product: all that we, the people and our employers, produced) was $16 trillion.

This current figure of $12.3 trillion is just what the US gov't OWES in debt obligations to all manner of other entities: foreign and domestic - via things like Treasury bonds. This is money our gov't has spent already and owes payback with interest on it - it is not anything we the people have borrowed though it is money our gov't has borrowed and oftentimes redistributes back to us in one form or another (no wonder the Chinese are so pissed). We are on the hook for it in any case via taxes.

Now this $12.3 trillion figure has NOTHING to do with US worker productivity or our GDP. It is ONLY a statement of what the federal gov't of the US owes to others, based on its own lending to pay for things like wars, welfare, redistributions of wealth to "non-natural persons" (eg, so-called corporate welfare, etc.), direct gov't services to states and to individuals, and so on.

So for perspective: Imagine you make $80k/year. Let's say that that $80k represents the $16 trillion the USA produced in 2006. Now let's say you owed total in all your debts (and we'll be generous and say we are excluding your house): $12.3 trillion. What %age of that figure would be of the $16 trillion? Answer: (12.3/16) x 100 = 76.88%. Now take your $80k/yr salary and do the math: $80,000 x .7688 = $61,500

So, you owe $61,500 in debt, even aside from your house, but make only $80k/yr, and of course you have lots of expenses you have during the year such as the mortgage, food, home and personal upkeep, etc. How do you keep up? Well if you can, you just keep borrowing. And that is what we are doing. And since we're a country and a very big one, it seems, no one wants to really say "No!" when in fact any bank would have long ago cut us off if we were just individuals looking to borrow more money again and again.

Now before you say this is not a good analogy because our sovereign debt stretches out over 100s of years (eg: Treasury bonds with a 100-yr maturity, and we keep issuing them), I just want to say that actually, we as individuals are not much different. In fact at least with sovereign debt there is a time the note comes due. With our revolving credit debt, we can easily use it until we die. Those are in fact better terms than sovereign debt. Buyers of sovereign debt are also betting that the country whose debt they are buying will be around when the note comes due. Well like anyone who bought Soviet debt found out, that is not always the case. (See http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aapTzajNP0XI :
"Russia last month paid the last of its Soviet foreign trade debt, exchanging $406 million of so-called FTO debt for cash and Eurobonds. Russia plans to return this year to the international debt markets for the first time since 1998, when it defaulted on about $40 billion of domestic debt.").

In this position, anyone would say you are bankrupt, but since we are a big ol' honkin' country, we're "too big to fail". (That's what they said about GM, too, which did, in fact, fail, and they had the US gov't on their side - don't believe the press, GM did in fact fail). Well, the USSR failed. And so you wonder why anyone would suggest that the USA may not be able to remain together as a political entity "merely" because it is having cash-flow or debt problems? It was cash-flow and debt problems that brought down the USSR, not the ideological issues that some would have you believe were the cause. They just couldn't make good on their bills to anyone else or to one another.

Now re "falling apart" over money - well, people "fall apart" all the time over cash flow and debt problems. As you well know, they kill themselves over it. They kill wives and children over it, then themselves over it, leading to grisly "News at 11" reports no one wants to watch. Or a better outcome, they "merely" get divorces. Or maybe if they can do it, they declare bankruptcy and shunt from job to job, apt. to apt., relationship to relationship, trying to find someone to have some faith in them. But once bearing this modern-day Mark of Cain, always bearing this modern-day Mark of Cain. A person with bad credit is a burden, like a leper. They are never entirely trustworthy and no one should take too much of a chance. It's as bad for some employers as being asked to hire a convicted felon, yet one who was in jail over drugs or a violent crime.

The same thing is happening here but on a grand scale. No one wants to be left holding the bag. Did you see this off-linked from the reference on my earlier note re US state secession proposals?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_secession_proposals

So why would one think then that where there are discussions of states splitting up ("Um, WE're not going to be stuck with YOUR debt!") or of the union itself (ie, the USA) trying to find a new way to organize itself so that it gets out from under the debt it created, that such is unrealistic or dramatic talk? In the past, nations have just become a new nation or new set of nations by pen-strokes and hopefully got some relief. (Alas this has usually led to war between themselves and their creditors, but not recently, as was the case with the old USSR - this only because they had nuclear bombs.) Creating a new currency has traditionally been the way this was done without busting up the country itself. The Germans did this at least twice in the last century, actually, I think, three or four times. But they also went through three different kinds of governments, too, and lost a really big war that they started. (Bad luck all around - for them, anyway. Amazing they stayed together at all in one form or another. Can't beat the Germans for this kind of stick-togetherness, really.)

So can the US do the same thing? Yeah, sure it can. Will it? I dunno. But the potential is there. We are only 150 years away from our famous Civil War. We are only 80 years away from the Dust Bowl and the New Deal (like it or not) whose existence arguably kept America from falling prey to revolution and becoming either a communist or fascist state. We are also a mere 50 years away from the 1960s and '70s that saw violent clashes and calls for armed revolution openly made in the streets, as well as political assassinations that we still discuss furtively.

[Actually, we have been coming down. We have gone from civil war to rioting/political violence, now just to the occasional demonstrating and rioting. Maybe there is some hope for us, at least in the civility dept. :) ]

Nonetheless, in answer to the question, "Gee, can what you suggest, American disintegration due to debt hardships and their associated problems, even be possible?", the answer is, yes, of course it is. More possible than a lot of other things. This is why I am not looking forward to the next 40 years, politically-speaking. But, I am hopeful, and I do love my country, for all its faults. I will hope and work for the best for it in all cases.

"US Army captain ruthlessly executes without trial an HP All-in-One Model 5510 in the Middle of the Desert"

No jury in the world would convict him. I know.

Categorically the funniest version of this clip from The Downfall I have ever seen, now used for fake-subtitling all over the world...

I saw this and nearly fell over. Like a scent from childhood that makes you swoon sort of in a stupor, just thinking of the lyrics much less hearing the jingle nearly catapults me back via temporal vortex to my single digits. How exactly does one describe life experience before even the capacity to do so really exists in any way that is not purely visceral? Answer: You can't. You either get it or you don't.

Found this freeware software that lets you dub over pictures and videos. So now, any hope of me ever getting anything constructive done is gone.

One of my fave (well, fave SFW ones, anyway) (de)motivators is this one with Capt. Kirk on it. I dubbed it some so yeah, that's my voice you're hearing. But most people reading this blog will not need to be told that. =)

Brilliant. Find a horse that has no interest really in competing. He doesn't mind looking at horse-a$$ 70% of the race. But train him to explode on cue after the others horses have spent their energies. In the last 30% of the race, win by nearly a half a length, no doubts.

BTW, I don't condone horse-racing, for a lot of reasons, not just animal welfare concerns. I would make the same observations however about any race when seeing this strategy used, including races humans participate in. A lesson in here I suppose: Sometimes it's best even when "getting noticed" appears to be advantageous to bet the other way instead.

I saw this and decided I had to make it into a motivational poster. It's too damn good.