Debt Threats
With all the talk about the debt ceiling and whether and how it should be raised I thought a nice little primer might be necessary on how much we owe and what got us here. Here’s a breakdown of who owns our $14.3 trillion worth of debt*…
- U.S. Individuals and Institutions – $9.8 trillion or 68 %.
- China – 1.16 trillion or 8% .
- Japan – $912 billion or 6.4 %.
- Other Foreign nations – $1.6 trillion or 11.6 %
- United Kingdom – $346 billion or 3.4%.
As you can see, we own most of our own debt. That 68% consists of me, you, our investments, state and local governments, social security, etc. So how did we get this far in the hole? Easy, the same way everybody gets into debt, we spent more than we took in*.
- Medicaid/Medicare – $823 billion
- Social Security – $716 billion
- Defense (Iraq & Afghanistan included) – $702 billion
- Income Security – $421 billion
- Interest on the debt – $213 billion
- Federal pensions – $213 billion
That totals nearly $3 trillion we’ve spent this year and only taken in $2.2 trillion. And note, I wrote this Monday afternoon using data from the national debt clock, and were going in the hole to the tune of about $500,000 per minute. So by the time this blog post goes up between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. we will have spent ourselves another nearly another $220 million in the hole. I think this is the part where I say the first step to getting out of a hole is to stop digging.
