It amazes me how many educated young men think our 21+ trillion dollar national debt is normal and will eventually be corrected.
Gentlemen, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but there is nothing normal about this. In the past when the national debt was raised it was due to something like a war. The cause would come and go and the debt would be paid down.
This time however it is very, very different. The government is overspending due to big government, military (funding the military defense of the entire western world) and social programs.
It’s a snowball. Instead of a national emergency that comes and goes, this one just keeps expanding. We have a significant portion of the population who have a multi-generational dependency on the government. Other nations depending on our military are so fiscally tapped due to their own socialistic policies aren’t going to be helping with defense any time soon. A government built upon the votes of dependents is not the sort of government interested in shrinking.
The end of all of this is insolvency. In reality, the USA is already insolvent. The only thing that keeps us going is the fact that the dollar remains the world reserve currency. When that status begins to change, it’s game over. When the world stops having confidence in our dollar the debt will be due.
How large does our national debt have to get before the world drops the dollar? It’s anyone’s guess.
Now there is one thing that has proven to extend the life of states embroiled in economic crises. It’s called war and colonialism. People on the government dole today who decry western colonialism will flip on a dime and support it once it becomes clear their government check will stop without it. The irony.
Even with war, resources are limited. Wealth doesn’t come from nowhere. Government dependency is a nation slayer.
Most of what is said is correct but the debt clock is not so helpful as an image of the cause of the crisis/problem The west is not going down the pit because the USA is in debt. The west is failing because it has rejected God. The God of the Bible will do right and bring glory to Himself. We may suffer quite a lot in the process.
The national debt is one of the objective results of the rejection of God. We need to remember that the rejection of God leads to real world consequences.
“At any rate, the thirteenth century saw in England a rapid decline of Jewish financial power and at the same time an official animosity toward them… The final step came when their special license to practice usury was withdrawn by Edward I in the earlier part of his reign; and at last, in 1290, after increasing severities, they were all expelled from the country under pain of death…They returned, as everybody knows, under Cromwell. Their numbers, and still more their wealth, increased at the end of the seventeenth century and concomitantly with this, partly as an effect of it (but here we much not exaggerate), a number of novel financial features appeared in the English State each of which shows the increased power of the Jews. The institution of the Bank, of the National Debt, of speculation in Exchange, and in fluctuation of stock… There were, of course, many other causes contributory to the peculiar position which the Jews came to enjoy in modern England, a position which he has not yet lost in external circumstance, though it is so badly shaken morally. There was the fact that England was the Protestant power of the West. This religious motive played a great part. Between the Catholic Church and the Synagogue there had been hostility from the first century. In so far as it was possible to take sides in that quarrel it was natural for the Protestant power to take sides against the Catholic tradition and therefore in favour of the Jews. Again the English were not only Protestant, their middle classes were steeped in the reading of the Old Testament. The Jews seemed to them the heroes of an epic and the shrines of a religion. You will find strong relics of this Provincial England to this day.”
Hilaire Belloc, The Jews (pp.185-187)