U.S. Debt is Now Equal to Economy

It must be considered a betrayal of the public trust for the U.S. government to have given us such debt. They have put political expediency above the future of our nation. While many of us sacrifice for our children Washington has been indifferent to our next generation. The Congress is universally disliked by the American people but are able to retain their positions of power. This suggests they act without our approval. So the American people as a whole are blameless. And since they act without our consent they are illegitimate. Only a revolution in government will restore the supremacy of We The People:

The soaring national debt has reached a symbolic tipping point: It's now as big as the entire U.S. economy.

The amount of money the federal government owes to its creditors, combined with IOUs to government retirement and other programs, now tops $15.23 trillion.

That's roughly equal to the value of all goods and services the U.S. economy produces in one year: $15.17 trillion as of September, the latest estimate. Private projections show the economy likely grew to about $15.3 trillion by December — a level the debt is likely to surpass this month.

The American people do not control their government because it has been corrupted by great wealth:

But the hand-wringing over the new breed of deep-pocketed outside groups has become a process debate – wrapped in the language of legal arcana and plausible deniability. And, when the candidates are pushed to call for an end to the ads or changes to the legal landscape that spawned them, they mostly back down.

It’s a kabuki dance that allows candidates to keep their hands clean even as they become major players in a new big-money system that seems likely to dominate presidential politics for the foreseeable future.

With all that debt the potential for financial disaster looms over our nation. And there doesn't seem anyone out there with any solutions that could possibly get the attention of an indifferent national government:

Higher interest rates on U.S. debt will increase our annual deficits and accelerate the growth of the national debt, potentially triggering a spiraling crisis of confidence like that we have seen in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and other European countries. And as we have seen in those countries, the crisis of confidence can reveal itself in rising interest rates not over years, not in months or weeks, but suddenly over a few days or hours.

Unlike the European countries which have recently experienced debt crises, the U.S. does not have a larger entity waiting in the wings ready to bail us out with outside capital. If we try to respond to market demand for higher interest rates by, in effect, turning on the printing presses and printing more dollars, that will only deepen our economic crisis and spread economic panic.

Who thinks that's a risk we should take? Who's willing to bet the republic that the U.S. will always be the safest place in the world to invest capital, that we'll always be the lowest cost borrower in the world?

It's a risk and a bet that I'd prefer not to make. Common sense says that we can't continue to operate on trillion dollar annual deficits forever, running up the national debt to successively higher and higher record levels.