The problem we dare not acknowledge, the Godzilla in the room we must ignore, because We, The People, have long since passed the point of no return and cannot escape the inevitable "event horizon," beyond which lies economic collapse, societal upheaval, and violent revolution.
It's not a question of if, but of when:
While public focus on the government's massive debt burden has faded a bit in recent months, it remains a huge problem, says Ron Haskins, an economist at the Brookings Institution.
I would argue that there has never been any serious public focus on the government's massive debt burden. For if there had ever been such a focus, we would actually have taken steps to solve the problem, like ending entitlement programs and draconianly downsizing the federal leviathan, up to and especially eliminating most Cabinet-level departments that are unconstitutional in any case.
Without the correct diagnosis, the patient cannot be healed.
"Of all the failures of recent Congresses and Presidents, none is more important than their failure to deal with the nation's long-term debt," he writes in an article for Real Clear Markets.
Because they have set up their incentives - which is to say, brainwashed We, The People - in such a way as to encourage kicking that (entirely rhetorical) can down the road in perpetuity. Which is, in turn, to say that they do not wish to "deal with the nation's long-term debt" because to actually do so as indicated above would be political suicide, to which they consider economic suicide (that they hope will land after they're safely out of office) infinitely preferable.
"Although Congress tied itself in knots trying to address the problem, the growth of debt remains, in the words of the Congressional Budget Office, 'unsustainable.'"
Which is just a word to them, rather than a calamity waiting to happen, illustrating, once again, that Congress has not remotely "tied itself in knots" over it, but instead kept the party rolling at a breakneck clip.
Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff is even more emphatic:
To those who say the government debt is easily manageable, he has a sobering reply.
"Our country is broke. It's not broke in seventy-five years or fifty years or twenty-five years or ten years. It's broke today," Kotlikoff told the Senate Budget Committee in February. "Indeed, it may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece." [emphases added]
We simply can't imagine it because it's something outside the experience of any American under the age of ninety. Which, for all intents and purposes, means something outside the experience of all of us. And maybe even beyond that, for the "black hole" that is coming will be worse than even the (first) Great Depression, because whereas that was an economic fluctuation exacerbated by the embryonic statist interventions that have ultimately put us in our current fiscal peril, the day of reckoning in front of us will be inescapable, unrecoverable, and terminal. And there will be nobody else, no other country, either able or willing to bail us out. No defibrillator to resuscitate the Golden Goose.
We are doomed.
Pat Buchanan once wrote that with the Republicans, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, whereas with the Democrats, there is no spirit. The latter set this fiscal crazy training hurtling insanely down the tracks towards national bankruptcy and economic cataclysm, the former have failed to do what would have been necessary to avert that fate, and We, The People, twice elected Barack Hussein Obama to seal it.
It's much like that old Pogo cartoon: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Hopefully the piper will be amused when he comes to collect. Because he won't be bringing any anesthetic.
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