Reader Comment of the Week

Source: Government Buys Stock in Sinking Corporate Giants

You're right, the government isn't reaching into my pocket right now for $85 billion, what it IS doing is spending from deficit. Every single dollar that the government spends that isn't spent paying back our foreign debt commitments puts us further into debt by putting off the payment. Right now we just pay the interest on the national debt (and even that amounts to billions annually), sort of like just paying the $10 minimum on $1000 worth of monthly credit charges.

Eventually the creditor comes calling and you'll have to pay up. But government creditors don't work on the time-span of a single human life. So yeah, they aren't asking ME for the money, but they are asking my great grandchildren for it. And with the future being the future (and thereby inherently unpredictable) it could be that we just keep doing this ad infinitum... or Japan/China/Europe builds up a grand armada, conquers the U.S. and enslaves us until we repay our debt (plus reparations for the war to enslave us, plus interest, you get the point).

The government would literally have to stop EVERYTHING, yet still tax you for services it no longer provides, and put all of that money into paying off the debt to really tackle the issue. And it would have to continue this practice for generations, so don't expect to recover anytime soon. In the old world order, warfare would wipe these things out. After WWI the U.S. was the world's gold safe (literally, we held almost all of it) and they owed us for that service. In a world where war is illegal - I'm not talking about brushfire conflicts, I'm talking about massive scale invasions - that wonderful little debt-eraser is out of the arsenal.

In a free-trade dominated world we're just all supposed to spend beyond our means and be content with it. The U.S. just needs to hope that some country out there doesn't wise up and realize that political realism didn't die with the Soviet Union and that power politics are still important. If somebody wants to thump us, they could do it. China could destroy America tomorrow by dumping our currency in full, we'd literally be completely annihilated economically. China may be planning to do just this, but they're just bidding their time until they can back up their economic terrorism with military might. Until then, we've got to cross our fingers and hope that our elites can wine and dine the world with country club memberships to the point that they forget just how completely owned we are.

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