The Liberal Media Spins the National Debt

For those of you who might happen to get Parade Magazine as an insert in your Sunday newspaper, you might have come across an article written by Rebecca Webber and Dr. Ranit Mishori in the section called Intelligence Report. This is an excellent example of taking the best set of numbers you can find to fit your personal world narrative. Parade Magazine has always been a very liberal piece of Sunday entertainment, but in the last few years it has become blatantly biased toward the Socialist agenda. So, what was wrong with their report?

In their article they try to show that other countries are in worse shape than the US and conclude that we are not so bad off. The title of their article was "Does America Owe Too Much?" They start out by saying that "the US public debt was $7.5 trillion - about 53% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Technically, that is factual, but what is wrong is that they are including only part of the debt, the public debt, not the gross national debt. The Gross National Debt, which includes the total of our obligations is actually around $13 trillion and is estimated to be over $14 trillion at the end of this year and that is nearly equal to the entire (GDP). These kinds of distortions are not just wrong, they are dangerous. They intentionally mislead the public into a false sense of security. They go on in the article to site other numbers used by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as though these were official numbers that we should all use. The CBO is not an official source for any economic numbers. They use the numbers supplied by others to estimate outcomes based on various scenarios. The source for most the official government numbers comes from the Department of Commerce and the Treasury Department. Do not be mislead by these spinners of political narratives. The truth lies with the facts and we should let the numbers speak for themselves.

It is also important for citizens to understand that there is no bottomless pit of investment money around the world waiting to absorb our debt. Nearly all money that is available for investment is already invested in something. In order for markets to be willing to buy our debt through treasury notes, they have to be more attractive than what the money is already earning in other investment instruments.
At the moment, Congress and this Administration are on a very dangerous path and something will eventually have to give. There is simply not enough money in the system to be able to support these massive numbers that are being spent. Americans must wake up because only they can stop this drunken spending spree.