Sunday 7 August 2011

Finance 101


We like this from American financial author Dave Ramsey, "If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, and are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget and debt, reduced to a level that we can understand."

Hat tip to David Bisman.

4 comments:

Adolf Fiinkensein said...

And the Republicans and Tea Party had to fight like hell JUST TO GET THAT LOUSY reduction.

Anonymous said...

If you replace 'credit card debt' with 'mortgage', which is a much more accurate representation of the nature of US government debt, that does sound like a lot of families...

Lambcut said...

It's more like a credit card debt. A mortgage requires security held by the lender, usually over real property. Fortunately, China does not yet hold a mortgage over US Federal Government's real property.

Anonymous said...

Show me a credit card with an average interest rate of below 3%. I am not arguing that the US government is in a very bad situation and needs to make substantial cuts to unfunded pension/medicare obligations just:
1)I believe how democratic governments act represent how 'peoples' act. Therefore, high government debt is unsurprising considering high household debt in many countries.
2) Comparing the US government to a household or business is imperfect considering the governments ability to print or seize (tax) money to pay of the debt. Of course such actions would have devastating effects but the ability to increase seizure of citizens private money means that really have a call option over a lot of real property.