Immediate future trend lines are not looking too good for the US public debt situation. The dollar is losing strength on a monthly basis. People are losing jobs left and right. The housing market has crashed and is still tumbling. And last but definitely not least, keeping the Iraq war going is costing us billions of dollars that we don’t have. Because we don’t have the money, we borrow it – from foreign governments. This has the very real effect of increasing our public debt to the point where we are now the biggest debtor nation that the world has ever seen. The U.S. is basically in hock to foreign governments for this war meaning that they implicitly get to have a say in how we run our government – especially in the realm of foreign affairs.
It’s hard to believe that less than eight years ago, the U.S. was running a budget surplus. It’s sad to know that in that time we’ve managed to squander it to the point where we’re not simply running a budget deficit, we’re running the biggest budget deficit in our history.