The other week I wrote that, depending how you run the numbers, we’re already worse than Greece. Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker isn’t ready to go that far, but he does have a Republican Senate graph demonstrating that the US is broker than Europe. In a nutshell:
US debt: $15.1 trillion;
Eurozone debt plus UK debt: $12.7 trillion.
John says:
The populations of the two entities are almost exactly the same, so the U.S. debt is larger on a per capita basis, too.
That’s not quite right. There are about 313 million Americans, 330 million or so in the Eurozone (ie, excluding the United Kingdom). So, if you do a direct US/Eurozone comparison it’s $15.1 trillion over here, $10.8 trillion over there, which means at the present rate, in another seven or eight months Americans will be 50 per cent more indebted than the Euros. And I would say that even that understates it, since most Continental nations have far more centralized governments while ours is a purely federal debt excluding another $3 trillion or so in combined state and local debt.
They have another advantage: Whatever you think of these guys, from Dublin to Madrid to Athens they’re talking austerity and cuts. Over here, the ruling party has no plan, no plan to come up with a plan, lots of plans to keep spending more more more – and a leader traipsing round the country offering only hack demagoguery against the only plan on the table.