Back on May 25 2010, just as the Greek fiesta was starting to unravel, we wrote the following [5]: "Total US debt per today's Daily Treasury Statement was $12,989,095 million. Also today, the US Treasury auctioned off $42 billion in 2 Year debt. This means that as of this moment, assuming the new debt were to settle today, the US has $13,031,095 billion in debt: congratulation America - you have now passed lucky $13 trillion in total debt. But don't worry, we won't stay here for long. At the current rate of issuance, $14 trillion will be passed in 8 months, and $15 trillion in another 7. By the end of 2011, we estimate total US sovereign debt to be about $15.5 trillion. For some recent vivid examples of prosperity courtesy of runaway debt issuance, please see Argentina, Japan and Greece." We apologize profusely, as we were off by two months.
[6]
And yet we are far closer than Obama's 2010 budget titled "A New Era Of Responsibility [7]", which predicted that full year 2012 debt would be just $200MM higher than where debt is now. Instead, it will be about $1 trillion more. And of course, together with underestimating debt, Obama naturally went ahead and overestimated GDP: an unheard of event.
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