Debt Doom Is Coming

Debt doom is coming, everyone knows it, no one is doing anything about it.

I don’t have any ideas either.  That is, I see no way, under current political constraints, to keep the debt from growing to the point at which it is not merely unsustainable, but actually causing fiscal collapse.  As economist Herb Stein said, something that can’t go on forever, won’t.

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.