Broker than broke | Power Line

We’re heading for another one of those dreary, manufactured “debt-ceiling” crises. Today, from the Associated Press (AP),

The United States is on track to hit its statutory debt ceiling — the so-called X-date when the country runs short of money to pay its bills— as early as August without a deal between lawmakers and the White House, according to a Congressional Budget Office report Wednesday.

Yes, it’s true, there is a legal limit to the amount of debit that America can issue. So, every few months, Congress votes to increase the number, and we carry on with business as usual. For a time, during the Biden Administration, Congress did away with the very concept of a debt ceiling, and allowed unlimited borrowing by the U.S. Treasury.

Truth be told, America is broke. Broker than broke. Broken than any national government has been in the history of nations.

The national debt clock shows a running total north of $36 trillion (with a “t”) and climbing. In the time it took you to read the preceding sentence, the national debt increased another $400,000.

In 1980, the clock shows that, as a share of the national economy (gross domestic product, (GDP), the debt ratio stood at 34 percent. We are now up to 122 percent, about to overtake the Himalayan country of Bhutan and heading for the top-10 most-debt-ridden nations list.

But in absolute terms, no other nation comes close. America is No. 1, with China a very distant second. Yet we are told, on a daily basis, that America’s current budget “austerity” is literally killing people.

One hopeful sign is the move by the debt clock to include a new counter showing the budget savings achieved by Elon Musk’s DOGE effort. So far, the clock reflects savings close to $250 billion, or about $2,200 per taxpayer.

It may not seem like much, but it’s a start.