My New Economic Plan Pt 4: Get small before you get low

I’m trying to become more of a saver than a spender.

At the rate I’m going, I’ll be debt free in 10 years and have over $5,000 in my mayo jar savings account.

Recently I guaranteed the success of my mayo jar account - into which I drop at least 10 bucks per week - by quitting one of my weekly hockey games. I’ll run in Springbank Park in my old woolen Toronto Maple Leafs sweater instead - for fun and fitness, eh.

Sorry, I digress.

On the other hand, governments in Canada and the USA are more spenders than savers.

Though I’m tickled pink to be a Canadian citizen, I fret a bit about our growing debt. If I don’t, who will?

I’m beginning to fret more, however, about (read Pt 3 for context) the growing national debt in the US, the country to the south that can, when it sneezes, quite easily knock us off our collective chairs and onto our comfortable behinds.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or someone whose body is suffering from the stubborn pull of gravity or yesterday's hockey game to notice the US debt is climbing toward the sky and into record territory with each passing year.


[Click on the chart above to increase its size, as if by magic: GH]

In recent memory, only Pres. Bill Clinton came close to a balanced budget during his term, i.e., with a financial plan that added a mere $18 billion to the national debt in 2000. (Maybe a booming economy helped. Will we ever see those years again?)

Before him, Pres. Jimmy Carter (another Democrat, by the way) came in with a budget in 1979 that added only $56 billion to the debt.

Every other budget in the past 35 years has increased the nation’s debt significantly.


More information about the US debt for the last 10 years follows:

Debt for the year ending Dec. 1999 - $5.776 TRILLION

2000 - $5.662 (debt fluctuates daily; a week later - $5.722)

2001 - $5.943
2002 - $6.405
2003 - $6.997
2004 - $7.596
2005 - $8.170
2006 - $8.680
2007 - $9.229
2008 - $10.699
2009 - $12.311
2010 - $13.440 (as of Sept. 14; link to Debt to the Penny)

Is it growing fast enough for you? If those figures don’t motivate us to get small before we get low, I don’t know what will.

Whereas debt used to grow yearly by the billions of dollars, now it grows by the trillions.

Though the US population is 10 times greater than Canada’s, the US debt is 20 times greater.

In 10 years, the debt could stand well over $25 trillion.

This is not cheery news. If the US debt is in the process of weakening national stability, there will likely be hell to pay in the near future.

I recommend you find a mayo jar, reduce spending, pay down debt and save for the tough times ahead.

Please click here to read My New Economic Plan Pt 5.

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Unmanageable debt can lead to problems.

I wonder what some of those problems might be?

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