The budget is going absolutely nowhere (Congress, Obama, dollars, leader)

[HappyTexan]

House talks to Obama. Obama dances around but gives no specifics.
Biden is leading this trillion dollar cut effort but flew off to Rome for a week.
Meanwhile the Treasury is pilfering federal pension funds to pay bills.

Are we close enough to a train wreck yet ?

House GOP lawmakers press Obama on borrowing - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110601/ap_on_bi_ge/us_congress_debt_limit - broken link)
"Republican leaders emerged and mostly repeated talking points designed to gain political advantage in the partisan tussle over spending policy. There was no suggestion that the meeting had produced any concrete progress ahead of an Aug. 2 deadline for the federal government to raise the federal debt limit or go into unprecedented default.
..
According to the GOP official briefed on the meeting, Boehner and other leaders told Obama that he hadn't put a specific plan for spending cuts on the table."

[JimMe]

Originally Posted by HappyTexan

House talks to Obama. Obama dances around but gives no specifics.
Biden is leading this trillion dollar cut effort but flew off to Rome for a week.
Meanwhile the Treasury is pilfering federal pension funds to pay bills.

Are we close enough to a train wreck yet ?

House GOP lawmakers press Obama on borrowing - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110601/ap_on_bi_ge/us_congress_debt_limit - broken link)
"Republican leaders emerged and mostly repeated talking points designed to gain political advantage in the partisan tussle over spending policy. There was no suggestion that the meeting had produced any concrete progress ahead of an Aug. 2 deadline for the federal government to raise the federal debt limit or go into unprecedented default.
..
According to the GOP official briefed on the meeting, Boehner and other leaders told Obama that he hadn't put a specific plan for spending cuts on the table."

U.S., say hello to Greece.

[MTAtech]

The comparison to Greece couldn't be more contrived.

Greece's nervous investors have driven interest rates on Greek government bonds sky-high, sharply raising the country’s borrowing costs. U.S. bonds are at record lows and unless the GOP forces default, win worldwide confidence.

The U.S. uses it's own currency while Greece uses the Euro.

The key thing to understand about Greece's predicament is that it's not just a matter of excessive debt. Greece's public debt, at 113 percent of G.D.P., is indeed high, but other countries have dealt with similar levels of debt without crisis. For example, the United States, after World War II, had federal debt equal to 122 percent of GDP . Yet investors were relaxed, and rightly so: Over the next decade the ratio of U.S. debt to GDP was cut nearly in half, easing any concerns people might have had about our ability to pay what we owed. And debt as a percentage of GDP. continued to fall in the decades that followed, hitting a low of 33 percent in 1981.

So how did the U.S. government manage to pay off its wartime debt? Actually, it didn't. At the end of WWII, the federal government owed $271 billion; by the end of 1956 that figure had risen slightly, to $274 billion. The ratio of debt to G.D.P. fell not because debt went down, but because GDP went up, roughly doubling in dollar terms over the course of a decade. The rise in GDP in dollar terms was almost equally the result of economic growth and inflation, with both real GDP and the overall level of prices rising about 40 percent from 1946 to 1956.

Unfortunately, Greece can't expect a similar performance. Why? Because of the euro, which is causing Greek deflation.

[Winter_Sucks]

Originally Posted by JimMe

U.S., say hello to Greece.

Two different countries in two different situations.

[flash3780]

Originally Posted by MTAtech

So how did the U.S. government manage to pay off its wartime debt? Actually, it didn't. At the end of WWII, the federal government owed $271 billion; by the end of 1956 that figure had risen slightly, to $274 billion. The ratio of debt to G.D.P. fell not because debt went down, but because GDP went up, roughly doubling in dollar terms over the course of a decade. The rise in GDP in dollar terms was almost equally the result of economic growth and inflation, with both real GDP and the overall level of prices rising about 40 percent from 1946 to 1956.

I think you forgot to include inflation. Since the US abandoned the gold standard for the Bretton Woods system, dollars were inflated 39% between 1946 and 1956 according to CPI.

[Pruzhany]

How about we take all their free time and vacation time away and then put them all on a Walmart schedule?