Guest Post: Understanding The National Debt (Sesame Street Edition)

I have been reading over at zero for awhile. Still trying to understand the nomenclature in the financial markets. Since the fed is pretty much the center of the government, it has always been a interest of mine. This is an article on the national debt. It gives a pretty simple breakdown of what is going on with the national debt.

Here is the article-Guest Post: Understanding The National Debt (Sesame Street Edition)

Here is a snippet-

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Words to live by. Remember that when someone starts explaining which way the smoke on an electric train is gonna blow, you should probably check your wallet.

I’m tired of convoluted explanations of simple problems. It distracts people from the truth, which is usually the intent of those doing the explaining. The end result is large numbers of people pretending to understand things they don’t. Bernie Madoff’s “success”, ETFs, Treasury auctions, the housing market.

The easiest way to confuse people is with numbers so mind-numbingly big they mean nothing to the average person. What’s 13 and a half Trillion dollars supposed to mean to Joe Sixpack? This is the best I could come up with:

We all here have discussed legislation, law and the difference between actual legal meanings compared to the everyday meanings of words. So you can imagine what legislation can hide if it has 2000 pages of legalese written in the art of disinformation.

The author is just going over the one component of the legislation in regards to the national debt and the ability of our government to obfuscate what they actually mean.

Notice this component though from the linked United States Code-

The purposes of this chapter are—
(1) to immediately provide authority and facilities that the Secretary of the Treasury can use to restore liquidity and stability to the financial system of the United States; and
(2) to ensure that such authority and such facilities are used in a manner that—
(A) protects home values, college funds, retirement accounts, and life savings;
(B) preserves homeownership and promotes jobs and economic growth;
(C) maximizes overall returns to the taxpayers of the United States; and
(D) provides public accountability for the exercise of such authority.

The above is not even ambiguous. It is right out there in your face.

Re read above after me telling you this.

Let us say that it would be necessary to seize 401k's, gold, silver or anything of value to sustain what they list in A-D.
Let us say that it would be necessary to eliminate ownership of property.
Let us say that it would be necessary to sell off all the assets of Anwar to settle our debts or for that matter, all the leases of say the Gulf of Mexico.

Do you understand the ramifications of just this ONE component of the Financial Reform bill?

Oh well, nothing to see here, walk away.