Quote Originally Posted by ChunkyMonkey View Post
[Economic Collapse] It's a matter of when. Uh oh
Yeah, we're pretty screwed. For 2014, they're estimating a $649 Billion budget deficit. This is better than the previous obummer years: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

2009 $1.413 trillion
2010 $1.294 trillion
2011 $1.300 trillion
2012 $1.087 trillion
2013 $680 billion [average GWB year was $221 billion deficit]

If you take all of the expenses that make up that deficit, there are really only 4 large items:
Dept of HHS (medicare) 26%
Social Security 25%
Dept of Defense 16%
Dept of Treasury (roughly 75% of this is paying interest on our debts) 13%
The minor crap: Dept of Agriculture (paying subsidies to big agro, no shit) 4%
The rest is about 2% or less: Transportation; Labor; Education; Homeland Sec; Dept of Housing & Urban Dev; DOJ (just 0.8%). Things like the Nat. Science Foundation gets only 0.2% of the budget (NASA gets ~0.4%).

Imagine if you went crazy and cut the Department of Defense's budget in half (this would *never* happen). At $580 billion (FY 09/30/14 amt), you only took $290 billion from the budget deficit so theres still a ~$400 billion deficit. Medicare and Social Security are entitlements. Beyond the obvious negative connotation we have with that word, it means that it's beyond the control of the budget, there would have to be laws passed to cut those amounts that are "owed" to the recipients. In short, we're on an inexorable path towards default on our loans with china. Wonder what will happen when we cannot pay them, or they have an economic meltdown of their own and come looking to us to cash in their chips. (remember why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor: We stopped selling them oil)