At current prices, Save Jerseyans, the United States’s gross domestic product (GDP) is $14.59 Trillion.
For those of you who don’t know, our annual “GDP” is the total market value of all recognized goods and services produced domestically by the United States in a given year.
Kudos to The Heritage Foundation (where I spent some time as an intern in college) for rendering the grim but accurate chart posted stage right; it reflects what will happen to our country’s finances if current federal spending trends persist (which, by the way, our state bankrolls; we rank last in the Union for return on federal investment, getting just 61 cents back on every dollar sent to Washington).
The bottom line? Our national debt will eclipse our national GDP within the next decade. That means the federal government will owe more than our economy is worth.
And they say Paul Ryan is crazy for tackling entitlement reform?
It’s crazy NOT to take him seriously, Save Jerseyans! I want no more talk of who might “run in 2016” from any of you; it’s Mitt Romney or bust in 2012. We’re rapidly running out of time to right the ship… we can’t wait for a hypothetical future superman to save us.
It's pretty bad. What irks me is that at the end of WWII, even with the high debt, we built our way out of it,thanks in part to Taft-Hartley, as well as the fact that ours was the larget economy in the world & almost completely undamaged physically by the war. Not anymore, and now, much of the debt is held overseas.
BTW, I worked in the Heritage building in the early 90s before they took it all over.