Christian Leftist

Our national debt has ballooned to such an insane amount that it has surpassed ten trillion dollars and broken the debt clock.

Yes, you read that correctly: the national debt clock has run out of digits.

I just don’t know what to say at this point that hasn’t already been said a hundred times over the past decade. We use credit to pay for most of our purchases these days that we can’t can’t afford in the first place, so why should our government be any different?

It’s bad enough that we owe credit card companies so much money. Think about the half a trillion dollars we owe to China (if McCain’s estimate is accurate, and I take his word with a grain of salft, but it’s still a huge amount regardless).

We have to stop spending so much on foreign wars. We can’t afford ten billion dollars a month, even if we do owe it to Iraqis to repair what we broke. We can’t expect other nations to shoulder our debts and risky ventures, or they’ll all collapse with us (see: massive bank failures and emergency stop-gap measures this week, everywhere). We have to start making and buying products on U.S. soil again. The entertainment industry cannot hold up our entire economy on its own, and it looks like that is the direction in which we are heading.

In other words, we can’t afford to pretend to be the richest nation in the world. We’re the nation with the richest population of debters, for sure. But that’s a far cry from being rich.