"debt limit"

(Reactions to recent events by Harrison Schmitt — Heartland Institute Board member, former U.S. Senator (R-N.M.), and the last man (and first scientist) to set foot on the moon. (Cross-posted at America’s Uncommon Sense): bin…

Reactions to recent events by Harrison Schmitt — Heartland Institute Board member, former U.S. Senator (R-N.M.), and the last man (and first scientist) to set foot on the moon. (Cross-posted at America’s Uncommon Sense): bin Laden…

Government paternalism consists not only of giving people things they didn’t pay for, but also in preventing people from making decisions that, in the benevolent judgment of superintending bureaucrats, aren’t in their best interest.

It seems that every generation or two, fundamental economic ideas are questioned and challenged.

Donny Kendal and Isaac Orr, Policy Fellow at the Center of the American Experiment bring you episode #176 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s episode features work from the Center of the American Experiment, the Mackinac Center, the Pacific Research Institute, and the Pacific Legal Foundation. 

In Homer’s Odyssey, sailors are lured to the rocky shores of an island by an irresistible siren song. To prevent his ship from succumbing to the song, Odysseus orders his sailors to fill their ears with wax and tie him to the ship’s mast.

Once again, the financial fears have been ratcheted up due to recent announcements by the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that by the middle of March 2018 the Federal government will have run out of room to continue borrowing due to the official debt ceiling.

In the coming weeks, Congress will again debate increasing the debt limit. 

After legal limits on how much federal government debt could be issued returned in March, President Trump’s advisers began calling on lawmakers to increase the federal government’s authority to borrow and spend.

President Donald Trump released his full budget request, outlining priorities for this year and the subsequent decade

The news is filled with the everyday zigzags of those competing against each other for the Democrat and Republican Party nominations to run for the presidency of the United States. But one of the most important issues receiving little or no attention in this circus of political power lusting is the long-term danger from the huge and rising Federal government debt.

It is hard for people to grasp the magnitude of the U.S. debt problem—and what the ultimate “day of reckoning” will be. The national debt reached $1 trillion for the first time in 2009. It is now well over $18 trillion. That’s the official total; the real total is much higher. Lawrence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University, has calculated that based on Congressional Budget Office data the real debt is $202 trillion, more than eleven times the official debt. It is also about 3 times what the entire world produces, that is, global gross domestic product (GDP), which is $72 trillion. In 2013 Kotlikoff updated his debt calculation to $222. That’s $700,000 per person, $1.9 million per household.

For the past year or so, there has been no statutory limit on how much the federal government borrows. The debt ceiling was abandoned in the last budget deal. But in the coming weeks, it is scheduled to return—along with the predictable illusion of a debate over whether to lift the ceiling or not.