$ Approaching 14 Trillion in Debt
Lesson 17
Lesson
April 4, 2011
This Week
Today: The US federal debt is approaching
$14 trillion dollars (Lesson 17)
Read Scurlock pp. 1-15, 59-74
Wednesday: : The federal bureaucracy has
reached about two million people (Lesson 18)
Read Ritzer, pp. 1-34
Source: OMB
How did we get
$14 trillion in debt?
Slower economic growth
Financial meltdown
Public spending
$819 Billion
Why are we going
even deeper into debt?
It works
Everyone else does it
http://video.pbs.org/video/1099844054/
John Keynes Maynard (1883-1946)
Debt is not just a problem
for the government
On average, college students graduate
with over $20,000 in debt.
There were 984 million bank-issued Visa and MasterCard
credit card and debit card accounts in the U.S in 2006.
U.S. Visa cardholders alone conduct more than $1 trillion
in annual volume.
Consumers carry more than 1 billion Visa cards worldwide
(450 million in the United States)
Sources: Visa USA, MasterCard International)