Tag Archives: national debt

National debt: the new Y2K

It was a pleasing sight to see Obama categorically defeat McCain in the recent second debate. What’s even more heartening is that the verdict of his debate victory is relatively unanimous.

Either way, I’m glad both candidates have been stressing repairing the national debt. When I was taking econ in first year of university, I remember thinking a $7 trillion debt was one of the scariest problems a country could face. I assumed everything would be done to immediately mitigate the issue. Needless to say, I was wrong.

Today, the debt has reached a point where the National Debt Clock is too freaking small to display the actual figure. The immediate solution was to simply remove the dollar sign from the clock.

With this incident, I’d like to present the morals of this story:

  1. The economy isn’t running out of time, it ran out of time orders of magnitude dollars ago.
  2. Y2K should not have been feared as the end of the world. 4MY of Bush’s fiscal policies should have.
  3. Killing the Dollar sign to allow more digits == Killing the US Dollar to allow more debt.
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