Full Faith and Credit: The National Debt, Taxes, Spending, and the Bankrupting of America

Download or read book Full Faith and Credit: The National Debt, Taxes, Spending, and the Bankrupting of America written by Alan Axelrod and published by WW Norton. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the national debt? Who loses from it? Who profits from it? Why is it a greater threat to America than international terrorism? In direct, non-partisan language, this book follows the money and finds the answers. Conservative, Liberal, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Socialist . . . Each has a laundry list for America on which the slow-motion cataclysm of unsustainable national debt is but a lonely bullet point among dozens of others. Full Faith and Credit zooms in on that point, liberates it from partisan programs and political orientations, expands it, explores it, and explains it. The book examines key dimensions of our national life—from a military-industrial complex more menacing than even Eisenhower could have imagined to a Tower of Babel tax code that covertly translates taxes into secret subsidies. With the aim of converting bystanders into informed advocates of change, Full Faith and Credit is rich with eye-opening data, surprising case studies, and you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up examples: • For every official the United States public has elected, its government supports 5000 unelected employees. • $1 billion is the cost to destroy $16 billion in ammunition unneeded by the U.S. military. • $20,973,890,000 is the total taxpayer cost to the Treasury of gambling losses deducted by millionaires. With easy-to-follow graphs and charts, as well as 20 uproarious full-color editorial cartoons drawn from the prior work of Pulitzer Prize–winning artist Michael Ramirez, Full Faith and Credit locates the tipping point of the $19.4 trillion (and counting) national debt crisis and offers ideas on how to fix it.