(March 13, 2012) – Some news sound like Prozac to the financial community and like depression to the rest of us.
The news: February saw 227,000 Americans find work, the U.S. Labor Department said on Friday, sending the total number of jobs created in the last six months to just over 1.2m. That’s the best run since the first half of 2006, The Telegraph reported. This information apparently had an uplifting effect on the stock market community.
The reality: The U.S. February deficit was $231.7 billion, nearly one quarter of a trillion in one month, the size of the actual Greek GDP these days. It means that in the first five months of the fiscal year, the U.S. has racked up $580 billion in deficits, Tyler Durden at Zerohedge reports. The U.S. continues to enlarge its mother of all oceans of debt at an alarming rate compared to which the debt of Greece is only a drop.
Add to that: The total U.S. tax revenues were actually lower in the 2012fiscal year period to date than compared to 2011, by just under $2 billion, at $625.5 billion. This is the weakest link for any argument that the U.S. is actually growing: What is growing is America’s debt (now almost exponentially), while its revenues are at best unchanged. This means that the USA, the proud home of global capitalism, in reality remains the world’s biggest and most helpless welfare assistance client, unparalleled in its dependence on external monthly funding.
Even more dramatic: Annualizing net tax revenues brings the number to $1.5 trillion, which is just 50% more than where total U.S. debt interest will be in 2014. At that time the debt will be $20 trillion, assuming interest rates are somehow allowed to go back up… to the astronomical level of 5%, Durden concludes. This means that the U.S. will never be able to pay off its debt, in the same way as industrially underdeveloped and developing countries will never be able to pay back their debts to the World Bank and other lending institutions.
Our conclusion: As Proutist writer Susmit Kumar has pointed out, since the USA is the capitalist superpower of the world, the state of its economy is important from numerous angles – especially from the military, political, and socio-economic aspects. With the constant weakening of capitalism the search for an alternative global structure complete with a new socio-economic outlook will continue unabated.
Copyright Global Times 2012