Tag Archives: Money/Economy/Taxes

The Last Time the U.S. National Debt Decreased: 1957

Happy Thanksgiving!

This year, I feel thankful for having discovered the Austrian School of Economics and the true meaning of liberty.

It frees me from thinking, for example, that the national debt,

$15,051,852,998,637.98 as of November 23, 2011

is my fault or my problem. It is not. It is the fault of psychopathic politicians and the problem of the millions of people who’ve become depended on their handouts and their brutality.

It is only my problem to the extent that our politicians will try to steal as much as they can from me to delay the consequences of their irresponsibility.

Knowing the rules of the game feels empowering. I can proceed honestly and without delusion. I can make more honest calculations about risk and reward.

***

Historical Debt Outstanding – Annual 1950 – 1999

The first fiscal year for the U.S. Government started Jan. 1, 1789. Congress changed the beginning of the fiscal year from Jan. 1 to Jul. 1 in 1842, and finally from Jul. 1 to Oct. 1 in 1977 where it remains today.

To find more historical information, visit The Public Debt Historical Information archives.

09/30/1999 5,656,270,901,615.43
09/30/1998 5,526,193,008,897.62
09/30/1997 5,413,146,011,397.34
09/30/1996 5,224,810,939,135.73
09/29/1995 4,973,982,900,709.39
09/30/1994 4,692,749,910,013.32
09/30/1993 4,411,488,883,139.38
09/30/1992 4,064,620,655,521.66
09/30/1991 3,665,303,351,697.03
09/28/1990 3,233,313,451,777.25
09/29/1989 2,857,430,960,187.32
09/30/1988 2,602,337,712,041.16
09/30/1987 2,350,276,890,953.00
09/30/1986 2,125,302,616,658.42
09/30/1985 * 1,823,103,000,000.00
09/30/1984 * 1,572,266,000,000.00
09/30/1983 * 1,377,210,000,000.00
09/30/1982 * 1,142,034,000,000.00
09/30/1981 * 997,855,000,000.00
09/30/1980 * 907,701,000,000.00
09/30/1979 * 826,519,000,000.00
09/30/1978 * 771,544,000,000.00
09/30/1977 * 698,840,000,000.00
06/30/1976 * 620,433,000,000.00
06/30/1975 * 533,189,000,000.00
06/30/1974 475,059,815,731.55
06/30/1973 458,141,605,312.09
06/30/1972 427,260,460,940.50
06/30/1971 398,129,744,455.54
06/30/1970 370,918,706,949.93
06/30/1969 353,720,253,841.41
06/30/1968 347,578,406,425.88
06/30/1967 326,220,937,794.54
06/30/1966 319,907,087,795.48
06/30/1965 317,273,898,983.64
06/30/1964 311,712,899,257.30
06/30/1963 305,859,632,996.41
06/30/1962 298,200,822,720.87
06/30/1961 288,970,938,610.05
06/30/1960 286,330,760,848.37
06/30/1959 284,705,907,078.22
06/30/1958 276,343,217,745.81
06/30/1957 270,527,171,896.43
06/30/1956 272,750,813,649.32
06/30/1955 274,374,222,802.62
06/30/1954 271,259,599,108.46
06/30/1953 266,071,061,638.57
06/30/1952 259,105,178,785.43
06/29/1951 255,221,976,814.93
06/30/1950 257,357,352,351.04

From www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo4.htm

Surprise, surprise, the much touted super-committee which accompanied the raised debt-ceiling is a pathetic joke.

open quoteThe debt ceiling battle led to a compromise. Congress and the President promised to submit to mandatory budget cuts. A bipartisan super committee was set up to put together a package of debt reduction cuts totaling several trillion dollars over supposedly a decade. If the committee deadlocks, the cuts will begin automatically on January 2, 2013. These must be $1.2 trillion in cuts, or $120 billion a year.

As expected by everyone, the committee is deadlocked. The Democrats want $3 trillion in debt reduction, mainly from tax increases. The Republicans will not grant this.

Democratic sources told CNN that at the meeting Tuesday the plan was presented to the 12-member committee by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, the Finance Committee chairman. A majority of the six Democrats on the super committee supported the proposal but sources declined to say which member or members disagreed.

The plan would have made cuts to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, which the Democratic sources described as a major concession from their party. In return Republicans were asked to go along with between $1.2 and $1.3 trillion in new tax revenue.

An unnamed Republican aide expressed anger that some Democrat had leaked the details of the deal to the press. I mean what kind of stab in the back is this? Telling the public what’s in store for them! This is clearly an outrage. It means, the aide said, that the Democrats think the super committee will fail.

Did anyone in his right mind expect it to succeed? The August deal to extend the ceiling and thereby avoid shutting down some government agencies temporarily was based on a sham solution.

The politicians want no responsibility for cuts. There was no record of which Democrats opposed the leaked deal. Some did. Everything is being kept hidden. There is an election year coming up.

This was the first proposed plan. The committee has not gone public with anything in two months. It has a deadline for announcing a plan: November 23. That is less than one month away. If Congress and the President refuse to accept a plan, or if no plan is offered, then cuts will begin a year later.

So, phase one deadlock is here. There is little likelihood that members of the super committee will put their careers on the line and vote publicly for cuts that specific special-interest groups can identify. There would be retaliation in November 2012. close quote (Read more)

France unveils $138bn bid to slash deficit

open quoteThe French government has announced a package of austerity measures it says will save around $138bn (100 billion euros) as part of plans to eliminate the country’s budget deficit by 2016.

Officials said the plan, announced on Monday, would save about $9.6bn in 2012, followed by savings of about $16bn in 2013 as France seeks to protect its AAA credit rating and avoid the financial market pressure engulfing other major eurozone economies such as Italy and Greece.close quote (Read more aljazeera.com)

Italy on the Brink of Real Report?

open quote Italy’s new government contains no elected politicians;
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti to unveil his government’s agenda ahead of vote of confidence in the Italian Senate this afternoon
Italy’s newly appointed Prime Minister Mario Monti yesterday disclosed the list of ministers who will form his government. The new cabinet doesn’t include any politicians, with several key ministries assigned to academics. Monti opted to appoint himself as interim Economy Minister as well, although he said he would nominate four deputies soon. Monti will unveil his agenda this afternoon, ahead of a vote of confidence in the Italian Senate. According to La Stampa, Monti is expected to address several controversial issues, including further reform of the Italian pension system, a privatisation plan and concrete measures to liberalise Italy’s labour market. The vote of confidence in the lower house of the Italian parliament is scheduled for tomorrow.close quote (Read more openeurope.org)

Big labor is real enemy of the 99 percent

open quoteSince the class-warfare message of the Occupy Wall Street protests started nearly two months ago, the two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have taken every chance possible to stand in solidarity with the group of mostly underemployed college students and left-leaning activists. With AFT President Randi Weingarten joining in protests and state affiliates taking part and organizing protests of their own, the teachers unions are quick to point out that “public education, teachers and unions have increasingly come under attack from the one percent,” as Leo Casey, spokesman for the AFT’s New York City local put it.

The union support is pouring in state after state. For example, in the union stronghold of California, California NEA affiliate President Dean Vogel called on the rich to pay more taxes. “It’s time to put Main Street before Wall Street, and for corporations to pay their fair share of taxes,” he said. Meanwhile, the union rank and file are resorting to taking the fight into the classroom with lesson plans titled “Who are the 99 percent? Ways to teach about Occupy Wall Street.”

As the protests continue and the union rhetoric becomes more radical, one can’t help but find the situation ironic. While the teachers unions claim they are being persecuted by the wealthiest Americans, clearly it is the unions and union bosses themselves that have benefited from a system that takes advantage of taxpayers at the expense of our students.

An examination of the staggering amount of money accumulated by the teachers unions puts the situation into perspective. The AFT collected $211 million in dues in 2010, while the even larger NEA pulled in $397 million. Taking into consideration affiliated state groups, the unions collectively take in about $1 billion, more than half of which is taken by force in states with compulsory unionism. If you take into account their vast budgets and revenue streams forcibly collected from teachers, the NEA and AFT numbers align nicely with those of the corporations they so vehemently criticize.close quote (Read more from washingtontimes.com)

Former Federal Reserve Economist Likely Next Prime Minister of Greece

open quote“Lucas Papademos will be as of tomorrow the new prime minister of the country after the agreement that the outgoing Prime Minister George Papandreou and the opposition head Antonis Samaras reached last night,” reports the Greek daily Ta Nea.

Papademos is a 100% bankster tool. There will never ever be even the suggestion of a referendum on any program the banksters want passed. It will simply be passed.

Papademos is currently a visiting professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was previously a vice president of the European Central Bank and also served as a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

He is a Trilateral Commission member. close quote (Read more economicpolicyjournal.com)

Rating agencies making sovereign debt look bad? Criminalize rating agencies!

EU Considers Ban on Country Ratings

open quoteThis week alone has seen a ratings downgrade for Spain as well as a threat by agencies to review France’s AAA status — and the markets have taken notice. Once again, it would seem, ratings agencies are making things difficult for European countries.

Now, the European Union is considering doing something about it.

European Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier is considering a move to ban the agencies from publishing outlook reports on EU countries entangled in a crisis, according to a report in Thursday’s issue of the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper.

In an internal draft of a reform to an EU law applying to ratings agencies obtained by the paper, Barnier proposes providing the new EU securities authority, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), with the right to “temporarily prohibit” the publication of forecasts of a country’s liquidity.close quote (read more)

Un-flipping believable.

Should There be Shop-Closing Laws?

open quoteA really cool thing is happening in Germany. After decades of strict laws regulating when stores can open and close (Ladenschlussgesetz), the laws are progressively liberalizing. Since 2006, the decision has been left to the individual states. Whereas commercial establishments once could not open their doors before 6 a.m. or keep them open past 10 p.m., now many open earlier and close later.

Consumers are celebrating, while labor unions and regulators are not.

In the United States, we have no national history of such laws, apart from restrictions on Sunday shopping, which are left to the states and counties. And even with these so-called blue laws, the general trend has been toward liberalization.close quote (Read more)

Population “Control” by Murray Rothbard

open quoteMost people exhibit a healthy lack of interest in the United Nations and its endless round of activities and conferences, considering them as boring busywork to sustain increasing hordes of tax-exempt bureaucrats, consultants, and pundits.

All that is true. But there is danger in underestimating the malice of UN activities. For underlying all the tedious nonsense is a continuing and permanent drive for international government despotism to be exercised by faceless and arrogant bureaucrats accountable to no one. The Fabian collectivist drive for power by these people remains unrelenting.

The latest exhibit, of course, is the recent Conference on Population, to be followed next year by an equally ominously entitled “Conference on Women.” The television propaganda by the UN for this year’s conference anticipates next year’s as well, best encapsulated in one of the most idiotically true statements made by anyone in decades: “Raising the standard of living for women will raise the standard of living for everyone.” Substitute “men” for “women” in this sentence, and the absurd banality of this statement becomes evident.

. . . .

The solution, then, is the euphemistically named “population control,” which in essence is the use of government power to encourage, or compel, restrictions on the growth, or on the numbers, of people in existence. Logically, of course, the anti-hu-man-being fanatics (for what is “the population” but an array of humans?) should advocate the murder by government planners of large numbers of existing people, especially in the allegedly overpopulated developing world (or, to use older term, Third World) countries. But something seems to hold them back; perhaps the charge of “racism” that might ensue. Their concentra tion, then, is on restricting the number of future births.

. . . the peak of ZPG [Zero Population Growth] hysteria in the U.S. came in the early 1970s, only to be put to rout when the census of 1970 was published, demonstrating that the ZPGers had actually achieved their goal and that the rate of population growth was already turning downward.

Interestingly enough, it took only a moment for the same people to complain that lower rates of population growth mean an aging population, and who or what is going to support the increasing number of the aged? It was at that point that the joys of early and “dignified” death for the elderly began to make its appearance in the doctrines of left-liberalism.

The standard call of the ZPGers was for a compulsory limit of two babies per woman, after which there would be government-forced sterilization or abortion for the offending female. (The Chinese communists, as is their wont, went the ZPGers one better by putting into force in the 1970s a compulsory limit of one baby per woman per lifetime.) . . .

While the population controllers seem to have given up for advanced countries, they are still big on population control for the Third World. It’s true that if you look at these countries, you see a lot of people starving and in bad economic shape. But it is an elementary fallacy to attribute this correlation to numbers of the population as cause.

In fact, population generally follows movement in standards of living; it doesn’t cause them. Population rises when the demand for labor, and living standards rise, and vice versa. A rising population is generally a sign of, and goes along with, prosperity and economic development. Hong Kong, for example, has one of the densest populations in the world, and yet its standard of living is far higher than the rest of Asia, including, for example, the thinly populated Sinkiang province of China. . . .

The Third World suffers from a lack of economic development due to its lack of rights of private property, its government-imposed production controls, and its acceptance of government foreign aid that squeezes out private investment. The result is too little productive savings, investment, entrepreneurship, and market opportunity. What they desperately need is not more UN controls, whether of population or of anything else, but for international and domestic government to let them alone. Population will adjust on its own. But, of course, economic freedom is the one thing that neither the UN nor any other bureaucratic outfit will bring them.close quote (Read more)