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Interesting, how the debt has not moved for 4 months.
There just seems to be so much corrupt, fishy stuff going on. I venture to guess they not only cooking the books when it comes to national debt, but also inflation, gross domestic product, deficits and every other government indicator.
The table here says the debt has decreased $101 billion.
However, something strange is occurring... the debt was decreasing constantly through March 15th... and since then it has remained stagnant for 3 months. Seems strange to me.
I changed the date in the link in the URL from the link. The debt remained virtually unchanged for almost six months - from March 2017 to Sept 2017
That website's got little to do with the debt. It's just a free-running clock that advances at roughly the speed the debt usually increases. They bump it every now and then to compensate for its errors.
But when the debt grinds to a halt, they usually don't bother stopping the so-called "US Debt Clock" site.
Relying on that site (a private site not run by the Treasury Dept or any other Govt agency) for an accurate count of the debt, is foolish.
Interesting, how the debt has not moved for 4 months.
There just seems to be so much corrupt, fishy stuff going on. I venture to guess they not only cooking the books when it comes to national debt, but also inflation, gross domestic product, deficits and every other government indicator.
This usually happens when the govt hits the "Debt Ceiling" passed by Congress.
They just go right on spending, and pay for it by raiding various Federal retirement funds, trust funds for other programs, etc. By some technicality this does not count as "borrowing", though that's exactly what it is, so it evades "National Debt" accounting.
This used to elicit outrage from all the papers, media, etc. Now they just yawn and ignore it.
Eventually Congress caves and passes a higher "Debt Ceiling", as though that's going to stop anything six months or a year from now. Then the very next day they allocate huge spending to replenish all the trust funds they raided.
Just "Business as Usual" for the Big-Spending Government, not interesting enough to publish or even mention on the news. They know the "Rigorous Debt Ceiling" that Congress so righteously passed a while ago, will be raised without a second thought.
If people had any respect for this "law", it would be an "Instant Balanced Federal Budget", bringing all borrowing to a complete halt when it was reached.
Needless to say, nobody has any respect for it at all. And time and again we see their scorn justified.
Interesting, how the debt has not moved for 4 months.
Actually, what's interesting is your inability to understand.
There's no such thing as a "national debt."
There is a federal debt. Are you perhaps referring to that?
Since you can't even properly identify it, I seriously doubt you understand that the federal debt consists of two components: the public debt and the intragovernmental debt.
Intragovernmental debt is largely various trust funds. That includes the OASI Trust Fund (Social Security), the OADI Trust Fund (Social Security Disability), the HI Trust Fund (Medicare Part A), the SMI Trust Funds (Medicare Part B & Part D), the Railroad Retirement Trust Fund and trust funds for federal employees and military members, EPA superfunds, and a few other things.
In case you hadn't noticed, and apparently you haven't, the population is aging rapidly. That, in conjunction with lower tax revenues for Social Security and Medicare, has resulted in a draw-down of the trust funds.
The special treasury securities in the trust funds have significantly higher interest rates than the marketable securities the Federal Reserve auctions off.
For example, some OASI Trust Fund securities have interest rates of 11.3%. The law allows up to 15% for the non-marketable special treasury securities.
The point of this is that it costs much more to service intragovernmental debt than it does to service public debt.
So, when the government pulls a special treasury security bearing 11.3% interest and converts it to cash to pay out Social Security benefits for a given month, that is then converted to a marketable treasury security with an interest rate of anywhere from 1.0% to 2.25%, which is what I believe they're going for at the moment.
Which is more, 11.3% or 2.25%?
Get it?
Because it costs less to service public debt than it does to service intragovernmental debt, the federal debt will not rise as quickly.
You also ignore the fact that April was tax month, and taxes were due, so the government got a huge amount of tax receipts.
For years I wondered why the national debt was stuck at just under 20 trillion dollars under Obama. It never budged and they wouldn't update it. Then he left office and it was over 20 trillion as soon as Trump came in and its been going up ever since. You could just erase the debt that's owed to the Feds, or at least cancel a big chunk of it. They can't charge interest on money that has no value and they should be retroactively charged for interest that was paid plus penalties. And then disband the Fed outright or make them list assets to cover the value of the money they've printed.
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