Get off the beach!

I'm tired of people trying to claim that the US can pay its debts somehow, and calling people like me "debt fetishists" and such. It's so ridiculous because it's not even close in terms of being able to pay.

It reminds me of a situation like being on the beach with a bunch of people and I am the only one who heard that a tsunami is about to hit the beach. Then I see it and it's 100 feet tall. I try to warn people and they argue with me, saying, "Look how tall it is. It can't be a wave that tall." and other nonsensical arguments.

Let's use the metaphor of your home finances to illustrate the problem. It is based on the actual mathematical relationships of the numbers. Let's imagine you have an income of $50,000 per year. You have debts of $3,406,000. One million dollars of that three and a half million needs to be paid next year. Also, that is based on teaser rates, so the interest will make it skyrocket soon. Also, because of other promises you've made, the overall amount is skyrocketing and will likely double in less than ten years. But you will probably get a 5% raise in a few years. How do you pay the debts? Second job? Cut back on going out to eat? Ask for overtime? It's mathematically impossible!

Those are the actual proportions we're looking at. The government takes in $1.6 trillion a year in taxes. It now owes $109 trillion. Five years ago it "only" owed $67 trillion. Very soon the teaser rates will be over and the interest will skyrocket. Then what? There is no combination of taxes or cuts that make the numbers work. None. Even stealing 100% of our income for taxes still wouldn't make it even close.

This is the reality of the "social democratic" model. Promise everyone the sun, moon, and stars, borrow till your eyes bleed, and wait to collapse. We're watching it in Europe, and unfortunately the Nimrods in Washington have been copying that failing model for decades, stretching the limits of how stupid people can possibly be. So now we watch the collapse of that system as it grinds itself to dust with its own stupidity. Read F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom. It talks about how governments inexorably grind toward totalitarianism, even ours. What could be more true...and sad?