More on the US Debt

Here's some other ways of putting this into perspective.

From CNS:

In the first 19 months of the Obama administration, the federal debt held by the public increased by $2.5260 trillion, which is more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by the public that was amassed by all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan.

Read the article. Its a pretty good explanation of our debt.
ABC News explains more... even though it contains our president explaining away how he's trying to cut our debt.

Over the past year alone, the amount the U.S. government owes its lenders has grown to more than half the country's entire economic output, or gross domestic product.

Even more alarming, experts say, is that those figures will climb to an unprecedented 200 percent of GDP by 2038 without a dramatic shift in course.

You don't need to wait until 2038 to panic.
In the meantime, the poverty rate is rising? AP calls the timing 'unfortunate' for the administration:

The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama's watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.

Life expectancy, and infant mortality

Two lies came out during the health care debate that I want to make sure are addressed, regarding our health care:
1) We have a rapidly declining life expectancy
2) Our infant mortality rate is horrible compared to other countries

1) We do not have a rapidly declining life expectancy.
That was an outright lie produced during the health care debate by those who wanted universal health care. Don't believe me?
Here is a chart.

The argument has been, for a while now, that the US is 'lagging' behind other countries in life expectancy... which is party true: other countries don't kill each other as much as we do in the US. We have a much higher rate of homicide then other countries.
The irony is that we also have much more self-destructive habits then most other countries. The more prosperous a country, the more ways we come up with to kill ourselves. For instance, drugs. Cars. Not to mention skateboarding down a railing. The point is that sometimes, people become so prosperous that they actually do bad things to themselves. We're at that point.

2) Our rates of infant mortality can be found here, and the chart allows you to compare it to other countries.

Now I know you've heard (again) that we lag behind other countries... and that is also true. However, again, it doesn't tell you why:
Differing definitions of infant mortality, fertility treatments, drug use, and young women having babies.

I found this out after a long search on the web. The first problem is that not every country defines infant mortality the same. Some countries describe a child who is stillborn as an infant mortality, while others don't describe the child as being born at all.
The second problem is that it turns out that premature babies tend not to live long. That leads me to the other three reasons...
Fertility Treatments: We literally create babies that would normally not make it to term. They get born prematurely, and thus (unfortunately) have a high infant mortality rate.
Drug use: creates babies with harmed immunity systems
Young women: have premature babies at a much higher rate. See above.

I understand that these are hard things to look up. Honest, it took me a while. But I hate that there were people in charge, who knew better, who used these as arguments to why our health care was 'inferior'. It had nothing to do with our health care. Those were dishonest arguments from the start.

Federal Debt? Its not $13 TRILLION

Just so you know, when Obama entered office, the debt, as of January 16th, 2010, was:

$10,628,881,485,510.23

Right now, according to the article in the Washington Times:

Calculated down to the exact penny, the debt totaled $13,050,826,460,886.97 as of Tuesday, leaping nearly $60 billion since Friday, the previous day for which figures were released.

Thank you Democrats. You irresponsible assholes.
In 16 months, you've added 2.5 Trillion to the debt. And that isn't even including the Health Care mess you have coming our way.