Our country will hit a sad milestone this year that I hoped we’d never see…
We are now all indebted to the tune of $20 trillion. This is a crushing debt owed both to ourselves and to numerous foreign governments.
When President Trump was sworn into office, he faced a national debt that was roughly double that of when Obama became president in 2008.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has even more sobering news: the rising costs of Medicare and Medicaid could push the national debt to an eye- popping $45 trillion in 20 years.
This is before you account for the impact of any new government spending or tax breaks.
In fact, proposed government economic spending plans combined with proposed tax cuts are expected to add roughly $9 trillion more to the national debt in the coming decade alone.
This is why pro hedge fund investors are quietly moving capital from paper markets like the S&P500 and increasing their holdings of physical gold and silver.
A BURDEN WE ALL SHARE
Our staggering national debt is so “normalized” that it is scarcely mentioned in the evening news. But it is ours to share together as U.S. taxpayers, regardless of whether we benefited from the reckless, unchecked government spending it represents. Imagine what will our children have to say about this.
Think about what this terrible debt means to the future of the U.S. dollar, especially at a time when China has been pushing hard to become the new reserve currency of choice for the world’s bankers.
I seriously doubt there is long term justification for the recent Trump rally we’ve seen in the dollar. A sensible person can see how gold could be positioned to benefit if the dollar falls from here.
If we can’t turn this debt around, and do it soon, the dollar is surely doomed as a currency.
SOBERING FACTS ABOUT OUR FUTURE
Here the cold facts about our national debt:
1) If you divide our $19.9 trillion federal debt by population, everyone living in the U.S. owes more than $60,000 each.
2) The CBO projects national debt as a percentage of GDP will rise to 122 percent of GDP by 2040.
3) As of 2016, we already spend 7 percent of the federal budget on interest.
4) By 2040, net interest is projected to rise to 18 percent of the federal budget.
The numbers are so large, the human brain literally cannot conceive of it!
If you brought $20 trillion in one-dollar bills to the bank and handed the teller a dollar every second, it would take 640,000 years to completely fork over the cash.
The national debt is here to stay. And there are no signs that Congress has the courage or political will to tackle one of the greatest financial challenges of our time.
In a world where central banks have been printing money for years with little to show for it except negative interest rates, having any portfolio invested only in paper assets is a leap of faith that can no longer be justified.
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