4 Votes
National Debt Tops $14 Trillion
The United States debt achieved a new benchmark as it topped $14 trillion for the first time. Apparently, the nation is within $300 billion of the maximum cap established by law. The new Congress is now faced with the task of approving what will clearly be an unpopular vote to pass legislation on raising that cap in order to allow the government to continue on its present course. Just for a quick look at the debt over the past decade, I graphed the historical daily debt values available from Treasury Direct.
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TV Subsidies by Occams
I have been in a debate on another blog about radio spectrum policy.
US TV Broadcasters are demanding that the Government should compensate them for the cost of converting to digital signals on other channels and for giving up the old analogue channels.
I find this outrageous, especially given the state of government debt shown here. Television technology has advanced to digital and any broadcaster who failed to get with it would go down. So they had a desperate need to upgrade to this technology in order to stay in business, and still they want compensation from the tax payer for doing it. They have ad a lot of success at sucking on the public tit in the past when alternatives to the big networks were few. Now there are many and we don’t need to coddle them any more.
We just cannot afford that kind of greed any longer. Cuts in other areas are difficult but this one should be easy.
There is absolutely no need for compensation, A TV licence is an extremely valuable property and they will always be used. There is no need to prop up any operator who cannot afford to stay in business. let them die. That’s how markets are supposed to work.
And they never owned the analogue channels either. They had a five year lease paid annually. Imagine if it was land. How far would you get demanding compensation for having to move out when your lease expired.
Interest-ing by GreatWhiteDork
So let me see:
I cut up all of my credit cards last year. It was hard at first, but now I am (slowly) starting to really understand the difference between want and need. If only there were a way to cut up Congress’ credit card. I mean, we can vote them out, but the next party is just waiting in the wings to spend just as much, albeit on different stuff.If we are lucky enough to have a 1% interest on that debt, we owe 140 BILLION dollars every year just to break even. Assuming we don’t have any more deficits, that is.
This troubles me greatly, and I don’t know the solution.
Lines in the Sand by gnifyus
It would be interesting if the graph showed how many times the debt ceiling had been raised as it went up and up. Searching, I found that the debt ceiling was raised 11 times since 1996. I’m sure each time there was a long drawn out justification made for doing so; but after a while I sort of wonder why we bother having a debt ceiling at all if we just raise it every time it’s in danger of being exceeded. If the U.S. was a person, any armchair psychologist would recognize a certain pathos in this behavior.