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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Yes, they are. The debts of the US government are taken on with -- as of
today, and certainly in the past, -- the full belief that they will be paid
in full. 


Debts have been paid in full in the past because the US government simply 
borrows more and more money to cover them.


> If you're loaning your money today, would you loan your friend Alfred a
> thousand dollars or would you buy a thousand-dollar T-note? Which is more
> secure?
> 

Neither.  I'd lend it to myself to enhance and improve my own enterprises.  


> 
> We haven't come to the Apocalypse yet but in our world of today's society,
> as my Comp 101 students used to write, if you hold a US T-bill or bond, you
> more or less are holding money. To say that they aren't good is to say that
> US money isn't good. After all, a dollar bill, or a thousand-dollar bill, is
> just an IOU.


Take that dollar bill to the gas pumps or grocery store and you'll find that 
is doesn't command as many goods and services as it did just a little while 
ago.  The 'full faith and confidence' of the US government didn't matter a 
wit 
when the gas can isn't nearly as full with that same dollar bill as it was 
months ago.  This is just a mild example of  the fact that the US government 
cannot pull goods and services out of the air and declare them to exist.  So 
what 
does it mean to say that US money in any form is "good"?

> 
> If the US is in that bad a shape when SS clients are trying to get their
> payments, it's certain that the stock market will be well and truly out of
> action. Either the US economy is solid and can pay it's debts or it isn't.
> If it isn't, I wouldn't be counting on lesser entities to be solvent.
> 

This seems buys into the view expressed by Gene several times that payments 
to SS "clients" would be the last thing to go, that the stock market would 
crash first and all economic activity would come to a halt first before there 
would be any curtailment of SS benefits.  This isn't a likely or supportable 
scenario.  What will most likely happen is just what's happening with gas 
prices.  
SS recipients will still get the amount of money they've been promised, it 
just won't buy hardly anything any more.  Or when it comes to getting all the 
tax 
money that is possible out of the solvent citizens of the US and it comes to 
funding the military and other federal obligations, OR keep SS payments at an 
inflation adjusted level, it will be the latter that will go.

The US government isn't God.  When it overpromises, it can't thump it's chest 
and say "full faith and confidence" and suddenly housing and food and 
medicine appear for the geezers.  The US has renigged on its promises many 
times in 
the past:  "40 acres and a mule", hundreds of agreements with American 
Indians, 
etc.  All it takes is to turn the public sentiment half a degree and what 
many hold to be a promise so sacred and absolute that the whole country would 
shut down before going back on it, suddenly becomes something explained away 
as a 
footnote.


James