Thread: Obamacare

Originally Posted by DaveW

The real issue is that there is no mechanism to decrease the deficit, and we have never seen any real commitment from any politicians on any side to do anything other than continue to grow the deficit. It's somewhere around 1x GDP here, it's increased significantly in the last dozen years (12 years ago it was 1/2 of GDP), and there is no slow down in ideas to send other peoples' money to someone else for political gain.

There is a straightforward mechanism - increase taxes/cut spending.
If you like to think of US as a business the debt is not a problem at all because you have somebody else's money that you are successfully operating with. Plenty of businesses do that, remember how in 2008 the Fed had to intervene because commercial paper is that important.

Not to mention that running a business with one's own capital only is generally not done unless you're very small or very big. Easy access to capital is one of the major advantages of US as a place for running business.

Here's the public debt/GDP ratio from Wikipedia - it is nothing like what you're saying.


There is a dotted line at 2012 after which it's projected, because the data is not completely analyzed but the current figure is 74% (GDP calculated from Q4 2014 and debt figure from, March 6 2015)