Interesting comment on article re: US budget
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I see cstan11, Mike Dunford and Villarreal are long on abuse and short on analysis.
For Villarreal's information, I have four degrees, including science and economics, and a PhD, plus more than 40 years working in and observing the real world. That makes me rather more confident in my own informed judgement than most journalists, commentators and politicians have any right to be.
cstan11 is right when he says the debate over the debt ceiling is not an economic crisis. The actual crisis is that the US federal government is now borrowing 40% of what it spends each year, except there is no one able to lend it the money (and the command over real goods and services money implies), so instead the Fed has been printing money and buying US government debt, thereby stealing from everyone who has earned their money honestly.
The real US economic crisis is that perhaps 30%-40% of its working age population is gainfully employed. By "gainfully" I mean making products or providing services for which customers are willing to freely pay. Once you take out the huge number of real unemployed (16%+ in the US), the ones on lifetime welfare, a large proportion of public servants, the large numbers of students (and their professors) doing degrees that are proving worthless, the proportion of the private sector ("green industry, etc") that exists solely because it is paid by the government or performing jobs mandated by the government, you are left with about 30% - 40% of working age Americans productively employed. And everyone else lives off them.
That is the real economic crisis (mirrored in most other Western countries) and all brought about by the corrupt depredations of government over many decades. It was long hidden by the combination of government borrowing (consuming now what should have been productive investment for the future, and thus stolen from future retirees), an expanding working age population and, for a time, the desire of China and other Asian countries to grow their industry by providing loans to Western countries to buy the output (loans, which they now realize, will not be repaid). All of those ameliorating factors have now reversed and the grand ponzi scheme of post WWII Western governments is fully exposed.
That is the real crisis.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... grows.html
