Thanks to profligate Democrats and useless Republicans, the U.S. debt is a bomb that WILL blow up and it is now too late to stop it.
According to Glenn Harlan Reynolds, neither the GOP nor the Democrats have bothered to come up with any plans to fix the spiraling debt — and indeed the Democrats don’t even care about the issue.
Reynolds is right that this massive, crushing debt can’t be ignored forever. But the truth is, at this point, it cannot be fixed.
Look at how bad it has gotten:
Reynolds adds:
Of course, every institution in our government, media, and academia will be – and to a degree already is – mobilized to paper over the problem as long as possible, and then for a bit after that. But the truth is, there was some major enthusiasm for curbing spending during the Tea Party era, a decade-and-a-half ago, but that enthusiasm, along with the Tea Part movement itself, was quickly abandoned and undercut by the political establishment (along a more or less bipartisan line) because cutting spending to sustainable levels would have knocked a lot of politicians off the gravy train. Something that nobody who matters wants to be done, won’t be, at least not any time soon.
And who knows? Politicians have been kicking the national-debt can down the road for as long as I’ve been alive. There were predictions of doom at debt levels that seemed high back then, but that seem comically low now. So maybe they’ll keep that can moving for a while longer. Maybe new technology developments in AI, robotics, or nanotechnology will set off so much economic growth that we’ll grow our way out of it. Maybe they’ll be able to inflate it away to manageable levels without setting off hyperinflation or riots. Maybe aliens will come and offer us a new monetary system that will make debt meaningless, or enslave us all as food animals, also making debt meaningless.
But maybe not. There’s a pretty solid chance that we’re going to face some sort of economic collapse as the debt proves unserviceable, and there’s probably not much of anything that anyone can do to stop it, or at least nothing that anyone who could do something wants to do.
Reynolds suggests that we be ready for the political fallout when this happens, but politics will be the least of it when the actual collapse occurs.
Reynolds has a lot more at his post on substack, but it seems likely that this collapse is on the way and nothing we can do now can fully stop it.
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