The USA is broke. Even before the virus, we had a one trillion dollar deficit. Now, because of the virus, we'll be printing upwards of $6 trillion dollars. This will become debt and reduce the purchasing power of the US dollar. Savings retirees have worked their entire lives for will become worth half its value. Social Security payments might be cut, or more likely, the government will just print more dollars to pay for it devaluing its purchasing power even more. When the Senate votes 96-0 to print money, you know they're in no mode to cut Social Security and Medicare and other benefits Americans take for granted. In this way, we're not much different than Europe. We all want something for nothing.
Alan, the U.S. is broke like a man who owns a million dollar house, free and clear, but doesn't have any cash and so has to borrow. But he still has a million dollar house free and clear. If you draw a line down the 100th parallel in the US, most of the land west of that is owned by the federal government. It could, theoretically, be sold. And for trillions of dollars, if the government wanted to do that.
Here is a note from a federal website:
"BLM oversees 245 million surface acres of public lands for the American people. The agency manages 1 in 10 acres in the U.S., or about 12 percent of the landmass of the U.S. That's a little bit less than the size of Texas."
And that's just the BLM.
Another 193 million acres is controlled by the US forest service. Not quite as much as the BLM, but together, they're well past the size of Texas in landholdings. How much is Texas worth?
