Loki Loc: Georgia

I hope this will help. It is, after all, from Politifact:






This chart from the Congressional Budget Office shows federal debt levels projected to rise through 2038.
What word starts with "d" and ends with "t" and has to do with the federal budget?

You’d be right if you said "debt." You’d also be right if you said "deficit." But while the two words sound the same, they describe very different concepts. One is getting bigger, while the other is getting smaller. The politicians and talking heads don’t make things easier by confusing the two.


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It’s a mistake we’re seeing more often, especially from Democrats who want to defend President Barack Obama’s fiscal policies.

The latest offender: the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois. In an interview on Fox News Sunday last week, Durbin said the Obama administration was going to "reduce the overall debt of the United States by $3 trillion over the next 10 years."

Sorry, but his talk about the overall debt was ridiculously wrong. Instead of going down $3 trillion, the best estimate of the debt over the next 10 years is that it will rise by $8.6 trillion.

That's a difference of ... $11.6 trillion. That's real money to anyone. PolitiFact rated his statement Pants on Fire!

Democrats do have a point when they say that the federal deficit is going down. The deficit is a measure of a single year’s shortfall, the difference between what the government takes in and what it spends. And in recent years, the deficit has been declining, thanks to the end of the recession and lower government spending.

The deficit hit a mind-boggling $1.41 trillion in 2009 during the teeth of the recession, due to a fall off in tax revenues and an economic stimulus aimed at jump-starting the economy. It gradually declined somewhat, but still stayed north of $1 trillion in 2010, 2011 and 2012. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said those years marked the largest budget deficits relative to the size of the economy since 1946.

But with the end of the Great Recession, deficits are getting smaller. The deficit for 2013 is expected to finally drop below the $1 trillion mark, to $973 billion. The Obama administration predicts further declines through 2018, when they project the deficit will be $475 billion.

But the deficits aren’t going away. If they did go away, then there would be what’s called a budget surplus. The United States hasn’t seen budget surpluses since the days of President Bill Clinton.

So years of deficits, even deficits that are growing smaller, still means the overall debt is getting bigger.

Got it?

The fiscal future

Sometimes, though, you hear people on TV talk about the debt going down, and that’s wrong. When PolitiFact has fact-checked the claim -- usually from Obama supporters -- the explanation is typically that they said "debt" when they meant "deficit."

Back in November, for example, Al Sharpton said on his MSNBC show PoliticsNation that the national debt "has been reduced every year for the last five years." He meant deficits. PunditFact, the PolitiFact project that rates the talking heads, rated his statement False.

And even if some are feeling cheerful about declining deficits, the Congressional Budget Office warns that shrinking deficits won’t last if the nation keeps to its current spending and taxing policies. Deficits will begin to increase in years to come, and continue increasing for the next 25 years, through 2038.

Much of that deficit spending will be driven by spending on health care -- especially Medicare, the government insurance program for people over age 65 -- and Social Security, according to the CBO’s latest report. The agency issued a warning along with its usual graphs and charts:

"The unsustainable nature of the federal government’s current tax and spending policies presents lawmakers and the public with difficult choices. Unless substantial changes are made to the major health care programs and Social Security, those programs will absorb a much larger share of the economy’s total output in the future than they have in the past."

We see no end in sight to conversation and commentary about deficits and debt. So keep this in mind:

Deficit=one year.

Debt=all money owed.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/feb/27/debt-vs-deficit-whats-difference/

Grugore

I hope you don't expect to actually pierce the skulls of any liberals and let the cleansing light of truth in. Never happen.

son of witless

Misinformation is the Obama media's stock and trade. They know the low information voter cannot absorb much. Deficit talk is how the rich White Man screws the poor Black guy. Obama ran the deficit way up and now he can claim that he has brought it down more than any other President. His lower levels are still real high, but it all makes sense to a moron.

J Anthony Loc: Connecticut

Too bad none of that gets to the root of the problem. Here are some facts that actually do:
1) The Federal Reserve is not actually "federal". It is a private corporation owned by a consortium of very large multinational banks.
2) Except for coins, the government does not create money. Dollar bills (Federal Reserve notes) are created by the private Fed, which lends them to the government.
3) Tangible currency (coins and dollar bills) together make up less than 3% of the US money-supply. The other 97% exists only as data - entries on computer-screens, and all of this money was created by banks in the form of loans.
4) The money that banks lend is not recycled from pre - existing deposits. It is new money which did not exist till it was lent.
5) 30% of the money created by banks with accounting entries invested for their own accounts.
6) The US federal debt has not been paid off since the days of Andrew Jackson. Only the interest gets paid, while the principal continues to grow.
7) The Federal income tax was instituted specifically to coerce taxpayers to pay the interest due to the banks on the federal debt. If the money-supply had been created by the government rather than borrowed from banks that created it, the income tax would have been unnecessary.
8) The interest alone on the federal debt will soon be more than the taxpayers can afford to pay. When we can't pay, the Fed's debt-based dollar - system will collapse.
9) Contrary to popular belief, creeping inflation is not caused by the government irresponsibly printing dollars. It is caused by banks expanding the money-supply with loans.
10) There is a way out of this morass. The early American colonists found it, so did Abe Lincoln and some other national leaders: the people through their chosen government can take back the money - issuing power from the banks.

Mom8052 Loc: Lost in the mountains of New Mexico

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#10 sound very, very good to me! :wink: :wink: :wink:

Pulfnick Loc: Knoxville, TN

These points are unfortunately highly propagandized and not fully accurate. They cleverly dance around truth, bending it just enough to leave the impression of accuracy. A key tactic is misuse of the concept of money. Some points are absolutely false.

A few for instances:

The Fed is NOT a privately held corporation, although the 12 individual banks in it are. A little off, but still misleading.

Saying the government does not create money just doesn't make sense because of the use of the word "money". The government does create currency (a much different concept than money), but does not create the wealth that makes currency valuable.

Banks do NOT lend "new money which did not exist till it was lent". This one is absolutely false. Banks take in money from depositors and lending is limited to a portion of their total assets. They do NOT create money.

And on and on. By the way, I do know a little about banking - enough to have reorganized my company's banking in 1974 and creating - literally, out of thin air - $16 million by riding float on the Fed.

J Anthony Loc: Connecticut

Sir, these are verifiable facts. I appreciate your experience in banking, but that does not mean much in the face of the reallity of how the monetary-system actually works. Many in banking besides yourself still believe what's been propagated by mainstream economists and media.
If the 12 banks that hold the controlling share of the Fed are private banks, which they are, then how do you figure the Fed itself isn't?
Just who do you think we owe all this money to? It's not to ourselves!
When the government needs dollars for the money-supply it calls the Fed. Whether you can deal with this fact or not, the Fed creates the money out of nothing and "lends" it to the government. We are in debt for something we have the sovereign right to create ourselves.
Maybe you need to do a little more research. The only ones who choose to ignore or hide the truth are the ones with the most interest in maintaining this criminally usurious system.

Pulfnick Loc: Knoxville, TN

I wrote this in a hurry to leave and the above is flawed. To the extent a loan exceeds the bank's reserve assets, that amount of the loan does indeed increase the money supply. But the total amount of the loan does NOT increase the money supply.