Every little bit helps

"There are two ways for you to make a contribution to reduce the debt:

• At Pay.gov, you can contribute online by credit card, debit card, PayPal, checking account, or savings account.
• You can write a check payable to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, and, in the memo section, notate that it's a gift to reduce the debt held by the public. Mail your check to:
  
  Attn Dept G
  Bureau of the Fiscal Service
  P. O. Box 2188
  Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188"

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/resources/faq/faq_publicdebt.htm#DebtFinance

Auditor: Government Will Owe More Money Than Entire Economy Produces

Washington Free Beacon:  Gene Dodaro, the comptroller general for the Government Accountability Office, testified at the Senate Budget Committee to provide the results of its audit on the government’s financial books.

“We’re very heavily leveraged in debt,” Dodaro said. “The historical average post-World War II of how much debt we held as a percent of gross domestic product was 43 percent on average; right now we’re at 74 percent.”

Dodaro says that under current law, debt held by the public will hit a historic high.

"Debt Headed to 103% of GDP"

"'No Way to Predict Whether or When' Fiscal Crisis Might Occur Here"

Historically, U.S. government debt as a percentage of GDP hit its peak in 1945 and 1946, when it was 104 percent and 106 percent of GDP respectively.

In 2015, the CBO estimates that the U.S. government debt will be 74 percent of GDP. That is higher than the 69-percent-of-GDP debt the U.S. government had in 1943—the second year after Pearl Harbor.

By 2039, CBO projects, the debt will increase to 101 percent of GDP and by 2040 to 103 percent GDP.

At that point, Hall told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the “debt would still be on an upward path relative to the size of the economy.”

Video at the jump

Cut and Paste Links: Exploited bugs and other 'you-didn't-built-that, somebody-else-made-that-happen' rights of way.

[T]he fundamental division in U.S. politics is between those who take their bearings from the individual’s right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.

[T]he problem, Mr. Raymond and other open-source advocates say, boils down to mismatched incentives. Mr. Raymond said firms don’t maintain OpenSSL code because they don’t profit directly from it, even though it is integrated into their products, and governments don’t feel political pain when the code has problems.

US Debt Clock

Obama: "Raising the Debt Ceiling... Does Not Increase Our Debt"

In a speech at the Business Roundtable headquarters in Washington, D.C., Obama dismissed concerns about raising the debt ceiling by noting that it'd been done so many times in the past:

"Now, this debt ceiling -- I just want to remind people in case you haven't been keeping up -- raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy.  All it does is it says you got to pay the bills that you've already racked up, Congress.  It's a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved."

 

UPDATE: WaPo's Fact Checker gives Obama 4 "Pinocchios."