Only 14,300 of these piles are needed to pay off the USA debt (see footnote).

Some time in coming but with an annual budget deficit measures in trillions, it was almost inevitable that The United States would run headlong into it’s legal debt ceiling and have to find some other means of funding it’s deficit spending.

Not surprisingly, the US has joined Ireland and Hungary in dipping  fingers into the savings of the workers. In this case, pension contributions are being chanelled in the governments direction rather than being invested in pension trust funds :

The US has suspended payments into a civil service pension fund to free up almost $150bn (£92bn), as the major debtor nation reached its legal borrowing limit.

…

Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, announced the move in a letter on Monday to Congressional leaders as he explained that the move extends the government’s breathing space to August 2 to avoid an unprecedented default on its borrowings.

Congress needs to raise the legal debt ceiling beyond its current limit of $14.3 trillion (£8.8 trillion), which will require Republicans and Democrats reaching agreement over an issue that bitterly divides them. President Barack Obama warned over the weekend that failure to raise the ceiling risks unravelling the world’s financial system.

I am not quite sure why they continue to bother with the charade of the legal debt ceiling when it just keeps going up and it is unlikely to ever be repaid – £14.3 trillion in treasury debt and several tens of unfunded trillions in medicare and medicaid are more than the taxes of the next three or four generations combined.

I wonder how long it will be before little Georgie announces something similar here? In the mean time, expect inflation to let rip for a while to whittle the debt pile down to size.

The image is actually an art installation consisting of 10 million $100 bills - more here.