Economy & Budget

If you think for a minute that the national debt of $16 trillion (or $45,000 per person) is scary, consider this: It is only the tip of the iceberg of America's indebtedness. In addition to the official national debt, the U.S. government and state governments have additional off-balance sheets with unfunded obligations estimated to be as much as $100 trillion to $150 trillion. This equates to half a million dollars per person. These obligations include unfunded pension liabilities, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and states’ unfunded liabilities.

The Hill’s A.B. Stoddard sits down with Pundits blog writers Peter Fenn and John Feehery to discuss the Republican party’s post-election healing process and the looming "fiscal cliff."

The stock market dropped by almost 300 points Wednesday in the largest post-election decline in history. There was a rush of cash into U.S. government bonds as well, because those investments are considered a safe haven.
 
These odd messages from Wall Street must add up to something. What is it that investors are afraid of, and what frantic messages are they conveying? Because Wall Street is usually insightful in predicting election outcomes, why was Wall Street stunned by Obama's reelection?

For 77 years, the Social Security system has been a safety net for American seniors, vastly reducing the rate of poverty among the elderly and changing the quality of life for most Americans.

That was yesteryear.

Many economists and common-sense Americans now predict that the system will collapse within a generation. The problem is straightforward: The baby boomers' impending retirement will cause a shift in the workforce so pervasive that the Social Security system will become top-heavy, like an inverted pyramid.

After my column this week, “The Great American Comeback,” more good news was released that housing foreclosures had reached a four-year low. The Thursday jobless claims numbers showed a decline to 339,000, a four-year low. The job report last week showed unemployment had declined to 7.8 percent, a four-year low. At the very opening of the ABC Network News Thursday evening, ABC quoted improved housing numbers and asked: Is the recovery coming to a town near you? You bet it is.

The media is rejoicing at the prospect of an unemployment rate below 8 percent in the most recent report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, I would not get too excited at this prospect just yet. The reason why the published unemployment numbers are going down is because people are falling off the dole. Because they no longer receive unemployment checks, people are not only without jobs but without government benefits. These people are one step away from food stamps, which is why the requests for food stamps are at an all-time high.

The dramatic fall in the jobless rate reinforces the point I made in my last column about why Democrats are winning, and negates any lasting impact of the first presidential debate.

If Republicans want to pretend the good news for America is fixed, because they yearn for America to be bad, my answer is:

Make my day.

The 2012 fiscal year ended this past weekend with a whimper, as our nation suffered approximately $1.2 trillion of new debt this year, bringing the total to $5.3 trillion since Barack Obama became president.
 
$5.3 trillion is a lot of money. It is more than any other president has increased the national debt in history. In fact, $5.3 trillion constitutes about one-third of the entire national debt of the United States.
 
But most stunning of all, $5.3 trillion is more money than the gross domestic product of all but two other countries in the entire world — China and Japan.

Are you aware that the United Nations is looking for means to tax individuals, businesses and transactions of sovereign nations, especially in the United States?
 
The U.N. has set up a special committee to look at revenue enhancement measures — a euphemism for taxation. Why do the mainstream media ignore the U.N.’s efforts to tax Americans?
 
Some of these “revenue enhancement measures” the U.N. plans to implement assess a special tax on Americans and give the money to Third World nations.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, explains in better terms than I can muster why Obama’s campaign claim that his budget plan would pay down the debt is 10 Pinocchios false.
 
Here’s what Sessions said recently in the weekly Republican address: