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Originally Posted by Arch Enemy Who the hell did we borrow all this money from? I could have sworn most, if not all, rich countries were indebt with us. |
From Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._National_Debt
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The Bureau of the Public Debt divides the national debt into two main categories: debt held by the public, and intragovernmental holdings. Intragovernmental debt includes money for government trust funds, such as
pension plans and the debt for
social security which is about $1.7 trillion as of May 2005. Overall, intragovernmental holdings account for over $3.1 trillion of the total debt at this time.
The remaining $4.6 trillion or so has been purchased by the public, including foreign entities. This largely comes from the issuance of Treasury securities. Nearly half ($2.2 trillion) is composed of Treasury notes (aka T-notes), while T-bills and T-bonds (savings bonds) cover most of the remaining public portion of the debt. Bonds sold for infrastructure projects are also part of the national debt.
It is common for individual Americans and businesses to buy bonds and other securities, though much of the debt is now held overseas. At the end of 2004,
foreign holdings of Treasury debt were $1,886 billion, which was 44 percent of the total debt held by the public. Foreign central banks owned 64 percent of the Federal debt held by foreign residents; private investors owned nearly all the rest (figures are from the Analytical Perspectives of the 2006 U.S. Budget, page 257 [1]). The country holding by far the most debt is
Japan which held $679 billion at the end of March, 2005. In recent years the
People's Republic of China has also become a major holder of Treasury debt, holding
$223.5 billion at that time.
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The $1.7 trillion debt for social security represents excess SS taxes that we have paid in over the last couple decades (last year it was about $150 billion) that were supposed to be built up into a SS trust fund to pay the boomers' retirment. Instead, the politicians have stolen the funds from *our* SS trust fund and used them for general spending, replacing them with IOUs, which are really about worthless, because the Govt has to pay SS benefits anyway. The trust fund was supposed to be extra money to help cover the costs.
Having spent the $1.7 trillion that was supposed to be in *our* SS trust fund to cover their deficits, the politicians now have the gall to tell us that SS is in a "crisis." Well, yeah, because they stole the money with their deficits!
