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The U.S. national debt reached $20 trillion for the first time ever last Friday after President Trump signed a bipartisan bill temporarily raising the nation's debt limit for three months.
While at Camp David, Mr. Trump, with the stroke of his presidential pen, increased the statutory debt last Friday by approximately $318 billion, according to the Treasury Department. Before the bill's completion, the U.S. debt was sitting around $19.84 trillion.
The legislation allowed the Treasury Department to start borrowing again immediately after several months of using "extraordinary measures" to avoid a financial default. The bill passed last Thursday 80-17 in the Senate and in the House 316-90 on Friday. Around $15 billion in emergency funding for Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts was attached to the borrowing measure.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-debt-hits-historic-20-trillion-mark/
[That works out to just shy of $62,000 per American. --Ed.]
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Friday September 15 2017, @07:14PM
"10 years behind on tech" seems a little excessive, and we're more advanced in some ways. For example we had chip+PIN and then NFC-capable terminals in Canada for years before US merchants finally upgraded (and only by force, as card fraud costs shifted from card issuers to the merchant, giving a huge incentive to ditch stripe terminals).
Otherwise, we have access to most of the same toys at the same time the US gets them (phones, cars, TVs, home electronics, etc), I imagine there's fewer per capita because of the higher prices due to exchange rates and higher average taxation.
As for lack of massive interchanges... most of our major cities, you just can't justify the cost of building and maintaining them. They are massively more expensive than traffic light intersections and most major cities aren't hubs where traffic comes and goes N/E/S/W, they're dots on a line and traffic flows in and out along only two major directions (Vancouver: S+E. Calgary: N+W. Edmonton: S+W. Ottawa: W+E). Montreal's the only one that's really hit on all sides, and has the interchanges to reflect that, as does Toronto with N+W+E arterials.