Who Owns Our National Debt, And What To Do About The Debt Ceiling

I think the National Debt is a big problem. So do a lot of other people. One of the arguments made by debt alarmists though is that bad people own our debt. So it's worth looking at, who does own our debt?

Turns out that we own 53% of our own debt. The Federal Reserve is primarily responsible for this, buying up Treasury notes to pay our debt, year after year. China owns 9.8%, Japan owns 9.6%. Check out who is owed what.

Then there's this talk about the debt ceiling. Speaker Boehner is talking in questioning terms about whether or not they should raise it. Yes, he wants to play Russian Roulette with our economy. What's Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke got to say about it?

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke,a Bush appointee, explained Thursday that, yes, it actually would be really bad, inspiring panic in debt markets, harming the credibility of the United States as a borrower, raising the cost of our debt and creating a crisis in investor confidence that surely wouldn't be limited to the market for Treasuries. "The implications of that for our financial system, for our fiscal policy, for our economy would be catastrophic."

Bernanke continued:
So I would very much urge Congress not to focus on the debt limit as being the bargaining chip in this discussion, but rather to address directly the spending and tax issues that we all have to deal with if we're going to make progress on this fiscal situation.

The federal budget outlook needs improvement, Bernanke also said. But the question, he said,

is whether these adjustments will take place through a . . . careful and deliberative process that weighs priorities and gives people adequate time to adjust to changes in government programs or tax policies, or whether needed fiscal adjustments will be a rapid and painful response to a looming or actual fiscal crisis.;

The Chairman says this while Speaker Boehner wants to use this issue as a bargaining chip, and Senator Toomey is proposing we de-fund the government and only make interest payments if they don't get their way on spending. Republicans would throw us into a market collapse to cut the size of the government, showing how much they have moved to the right, just from the Bush years, let alone the Reagan years. Remember, those Presidents raised the debt ceiling without deep spending cuts.