The above chart is chilling. It plots Treasury Receipts, Expenditures and Deficit per person per month for the past seven years. Initially Receipts and Expenditures were close, not bad. Then things start to fall off the cliff. We now spend more than $1,000 per month per person for Federal services and collect just over $500. We used to spend and collect close to $650.
Now use a bit of logic. If we had a 5% unemployment and we went to 10% then we lost about 5% of the revenue stream. That is 5% of $650 or about $40. So where did the other $110 get lost? Maybe it is the 1%? I don't think so. So that is the first question.
Second, we are now spending $1,000 per person, up from $650. Where are we spending that. If we are paying unemployment, so be it but that is a relatively small amount per person, not enough to get there. Also we stopped collecting SSI, dumb but that would be in Receipts not expenditures.
So should we worry, I suspect so since no one seems to have discussed this and we have gotten sidetracked by the current slam on freedom and rights to choose, namely the birth control issue. That is just fodder added to the mess.
Just to collect more data we show below the new unemployment claims, raw and per Pop.
We typically run at 0.1% but as of last month we are still at 1.3-1.4%. That is not as good as the Administration spins it to be.
But back to the first curve, it is essential to watch this one, it is the Table of Doom!
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