From Denninger's Market Ticker:50% of the federal budget right now goes to entitlements.
This last month we posted a record $220.9 billion budget deficit. We took in $107 billion but spent $328 billion.
Isn't that special. We only funded 32% of expenditures?
Remember - entitlements were half of that $328 billion.
So let's see if we can do the math here.
Entitlements were about $164 billion last month in spending. The rest was, of course, the rest.
But we only took in $107 billion.
So even if we eliminated all entitlement spending we still did not have enough money to cover the rest.
Yeah.
If you want to know why the market is floating higher it's for the same reason you feel all giddy and special when you strike out on the town with your shiny plastic. You have magic cards!
It doesn't matter if you have a job, it doesn't matter if you have any money in the bank, so long as you have magic cards.
For how long does the United States continue to have magic cards?
Remember, from my ticker the other day, the federal government is directly spending 9% more of GDP today than it was just two years ago.
The market and economy are absolutely dependent on the Federal Government continuing to do so. Should the government not be able (or willing) to continue to do so, S&P 666 or DOW 6,489 will look like a bull market.
Now add to this that the continued spending in this fashion inevitably will cause interest rates to rise. It simply must, whether that interest rate increase comes from actual Treasuries, or whether it comes from dollar devaluation and thus causes oil - and by extension virtually every other price in the market - to rise at a meteoric rate.
Oh, and if they choose the second (inflation)? Then, as I discussed earlier, that entitlement spending, which is set to go parabolic anyway as the boomers retire, will have an afterburner attached to its backside due to the fact that all of these programs are indexed to "inflation", with Medicare in particular being indexed at several multiples of inflation.
But for today, folks, it's "Rally On Garth" - even though all of the above is not conjecture, it's mathematical fact and inevitably must come to pass.
Do you understand yet?
As to the economy being unable to continue without government spending, I'm not so sure. Granted, there would be the sharp pain as we ripped the filthy festering old bandaid off, but Say's Law (or theory, if you want to be cynical) has never been disproven: (free) markets clear. But first the bandaids need to come off.
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