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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (664807)	7/31/2012 2:38:11 PM
From: puborectalis	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575535

don't really care about your opinion.....got to get back to pathology in patients

To: Brumar89 who wrote (664807)	7/31/2012 2:58:56 PM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1575535

U.S. Is “Totally Broke”: Federal Govt.’s Fiscal Gap Is $222 Trillion: Economist By The Daily Ticker \| Daily Ticker – 5 hours ago finance.yahoo.com Excerpt: In June, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Alternative Fiscal Scenario (AFS) — the CBO's projection of the government's finances into the future. The projections are truly scary, but they received zero press coverage — not a word from the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, or any other major media outlet. The latest projection shows massive fiscal deficits as far as the eye can see. In less than a dozen years, the CBO projects federal debt will exceed 100 percent of GDP. By the time today's 20 year-olds have reached middle age, the debt to GDP ratio will be 200 percent, a figure that would make Greece blush. But the truth is far worse than these figures convey. The truth is that our politicians have been very careful in their labeling of government receipts and payments so as to keep most of the coming bills associated with 'Take As You Go' off the books. Consider, for example, Uncle Sam's promises to pay me my Social Security and Medicare benefits starting in roughly 10 years. The present value (the value in the present) of these promises is $400,000. How does this differ from my holding a Treasury bond valued at $400,000? Fundamentally, it differs not at all, which means that the government has a lot more debt than it's reporting. How much more? I'm not sure you want to know. I recently calculated the fiscal gap using the CBO's AFS forecast. The fiscal gap measures the present value difference between all projected future federal expenditures (including servicing official debt) and all projected future taxes. The fiscal gap is thus the true measure of our government's total indebtedness and the true measure of fiscal sustainability. How big is the fiscal gap? Brace yourself. It's $222 trillion large! In comparison, official debt in the public's hands is only $11 trillion. Here's one way to wrap your head around our $222 trillion fiscal hole: closing it via tax hikes would require an immediate and permanent 64 percent increase in all federal taxes. Alternatively, the government could cut all transfer payments, e.g., Social Security benefits, and discretionary federal expenditures, e.g., defense expenditures, by 40 percent. Waiting to raise taxes or cut spending makes these figures worse. In short, our government is totally broke. And it's not broke in 30 years or in 20 years or in 10 years. It's broke today.