Sarcastic investment advice was being published yesterday in the American media:
"Invest in Asia and in the better led countries of Latin America and keep a decent chunk of your money in gold, because you"re going to need it".
The warning is justified by noticing the discrepancy between the predictions of the CBO (Congressional Budget Office - a federal agency which provides Congress with economic data, together with other institutions of the Government) and the claim of president Barack Obama and of the members of the Congress that raising the debt ceiling will lower the national debt.
Of course, the first discrepancy that should be noted is one that is logical: one can"t lower the national debt by going even further into debt.
But beyond common sense comes the knowledge of the leaders, who sometimes resort to various tricks to postpone the bankruptcy, until the economy recovers.
On this level which overlaps with common sense, those arguing against raising the debt ceiling consider that the decision was a mistake, and even more, it will lead to an increase of the current debt of 14 trillion dollars, to 23 trillion dollars in ten years.
This calculation reports that the Plan drawn up by Congress proposes reducing expenses by just 917 billion dollars for a period of 10 years and furthermore, a special commission was set up to find ways to cut expenses by an additional 1,500 billion by November.
The objection is that savings will amount to just 2,500 billion over ten years, while considering the fact that president Obama added 4,000 billion dollars to the national debt in just a few years of his mandate.
"How can one make any progress in terms of fixing the debt issue, when one keeps adding new liabilities, of four billion dollars a day?", the opponents of the budget plan are asking.
They say that things are even