16,400,000,000,000

The new debt limit is sixteen point four trillion dollars or 1.64X10^13.

The Obama administration will ask Congress to raise the nation's borrowing limit by $1.2 trillion this week, marking the third and final increase from a deal negotiated over summer.[...]

In August, Congress and the administration agreed to raise the borrowing limit by $2.1 trillion in three steps. The deal was reached hours before a potential default on the nation's debt and only after the parties also agreed to cut more than $2 trillion from the deficit over the next 10 years.

Those two trillion dollars in "cuts" are not real cuts.

Both parties tell us that the debt-limit deal includes $2 trillion in spending cuts, and the national media dutifully reports that those cuts are severe, yet the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) tells us that we are still on course for the national debt to increase by $8 trillion over the next 10 years. Why doesn’t the discussion over the federal budget, spending and debt in Washington make any sense?

It is called baseline budgeting. Here is how the hocus pocus works. The CBO assumes a “baseline” for federal spending over the next 10 years that includes federal spending increases of $9.5 trillion over that time. Any increase in those 10 years of less than $9.5 trillion will be reported by CBO as a cut in federal spending.

Also the government just released some numbers

That professionalism is evident in the GAO analysis of the net present value of the Social Security and Medicare promises Washington has made to Americans. “Net present value” means the total that would have to be set aside today to pay the costs of these programs in the future. The government puts these numbers in appendices, rather than in headlines. But the costs are real.

In fiscal 2011, the cost of the promises grew from $30.9 trillion to $33.8 trillion. To put that in context, consider that the total value of companies traded on U.S. stock markets is $13.1 trillion, based on the Wilshire 5000 index, and the value of the equity in U.S. taxpayers’ homes, according to Freddie Mac, is $6.2 trillion. Said another way, there is not enough wealth in America to meet those promises.

Bottom line: the nation is headed for a debt crisis, the Republicans have failed to cuts spending as promised and there is no viable Republican candidate for president that plans to cut spending of the magnitude necessary to prevent the looming debt crisis, and there is extremely little possibility of the debt being reduced in the future as to do so would mean a depression.