On Life and Everything Else

Sobering Statistics

John Gardner -

Freedom Informant Network posts 55 facts about US Debt. Here are some highlights, or lowlights,  depending on how you look at it:

  • The U.S. government recently spent $27 million dollars on pottery classes in Morocco.
  • The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the largest snack food maker in the world (PepsiCo Inc.) a total of 1.3 million dollars in corporate welfare that was used to help build "a Greek yogurt factory in New York."
  • During 2010, compensation for federal employees came to a grand total of approximately $447 billion dollars.
  • During 2011, the federal government spent a total of $1.4 BILLION dollars just on the Obamas.
  • At this point, the United States government is responsible for more than 33% of all the government debt in the entire world.
  • If the federal government used GAAP accounting standards like publicly traded corporations [are legally required to] do, the real federal budget deficit for 2011 would have been $5 trillion dollars instead of $1.3 trillion dollars.
  • Some suggest that "taxing the rich" is the answer. Well, if Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

What's all of that mean? That ridiculous amounts of our tax money is spent on completely unnecessary and wasteful programs; that we spend obscene amounts of money paying the people who waste our money; that the politicians purposely hide how bad the problem really is by using fuzzy accounting, and that we can't tax our way out of this mess.

This topic should be garnering the bulk of the attention at these debates. The heck with Big Bird and Planned Parenthood and China's currency and Romney's taxes and all those stupid sidebar issues. They're meant to distract us from the real problem we have in this country -- government spending. But I guess since neither of the two major candidates plan to reduce that spending in any meaningful way I suppose focusing on that might not be as fruitful as we'd like it to be. Grumble, grumble.