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This is dangerous and a day of reckoning is fast approaching. Unfortunately the American electorate has demonstrated very little interest in doing anything about it. I'm not sure anything less than the leading edge of fiscal collapse will change their minds.
It's a bitter irony that people just don't see the national debt as a "pocketbook issue." For many it's just a partisan cudgel - the Left pretends to care about the debt when it wants to raise taxes, the Right to criticize left-wing spending programs.
But as far as their day-to-day lives go, the bulk of the electorate thinks of the debt as an abstract and distant problem, while any serious effort to control it would have direct and immediate negative effects on their lives, or the lives of dependent groups.
The electorate sees the debt as a distant problem and its size has grown beyond comprehension. The astronomical numbers sound like lunatic ravings. The "costs" of debt control, on the other hand, are comprehensible - $X less in your pocket from tax hikes or benefit cuts.
And of course the biggest components of the debt are "entitlement" programs whose meaningful reduction would be portrayed as "stealing" what the beneficiaries "own." This view of entitlements has been seared into the minds of successive generations.
The debt is now so huge that modest reforms from past decades, smeared at the time as dangerous "extremism," would no longer be effective so it's difficult to sell them. A morbidly obese system has little interest in measures that might help it drop just a few pounds.
The debt went out of control because common human fallacies were ruthlessly exploited, from the entitlement mentality to the rejection of incremental measures because they won't immediately solve the problem, and of course the contrast of abstract problems against concrete costs.
An increasingly severe problem is that we lack the civic spirit to join together and do the right thing. It hasn't been strong for a long time, but it's almost nonexistent now. The political class isn't going to unite and show leadership toward a goal that reduces its power.
And that's the rub about our new era of unlimited debt: it inexorably reduces individual freedom and expands centralized government power in countless ways. Every way you look at it, rising debt means the future is bleeding freedom.
There will be fewer options in the future, both individually and as a nation. More choices will be off the table. The debatable will inexorably become unthinkable. It's happening already. The modest reforms of yesteryear are now utterly absent from the national conversation.
But there you have the problem in a nutshell: abstracts like freedom and dying possibilities, what *might* be and what we *could* do, versus hard cold cash in pockets and power flowing through gavels and signing pens.
And the debt crisis is faced by a generation that has been taught to expect a dreary dystopian future, to feel helpless unless white knight politicians ride to their rescue. They were taught to see the future as so grim that having children is vaguely sinful.
It should be clear by now that white knight politicians will never take a meaningful step to resolve the debt crisis. From their perspective, there is absolutely no incentive to do so. We, as individuals, must unite to MAKE it happen, to DEMAND it.
But that will never happen unless we completely change our understanding of government. The political class only needs to keep us divided, dependent, and short-sighted. That's pretty easy. The irresponsible system can defend itself with all the effort of a shrug. /end
