Economy

The news is full of stories about people with non-traditional sexual orientations, the wars in Israel and Ukraine. I am tired of those stories. Ukraine looks like another Forever War much like our adventures in Afghanistan and Vietnam. Israel seems to be dealing with their neighborhood terrorists, and the combatants in the gender wars will continue to provide fodder for social media.

But all that is small potatoes compared to our national debt. Some people don't think it's a problem, they think things will continue to sail smoothly along just like they have been. I am not one of them. I think  the whole thing is going to run off the cliff and we will plunge into the abyss. I suspect that more and more people are getting pushed into poverty. Poverty can lead to desperation, and desperation can cause things to turn very ugly.

But I don't see many stories about that, so I was gratified to find one on RT today:

Tsunami of Dollars

Drowning in debt: The paralysis at the heart of the US fiscal crisis by Henry Johnston

Washington is doing nothing about its deteriorating finances because there is nothing it can do without risking major upheaval

It can appear puzzling why at certain times in history a government facing a looming crisis simply does not address it. The problems accumulate in plain view while little is done to actually solve them. The human imagination being what it is, this inaction is inevitably attributed to some mix of corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence. And certainly the road to any system-level crisis is strewn with missteps and short-sighted policies. But there comes a point when the horizon of possibility has closed and there is simply nothing a government can do without unleashing forces that could easily overwhelm it.

In the strange and torpid final years of Tsarist rule in Russia, the unfolding crisis that would eventually result in the Russian Revolution seemed immobilized in a state of suspension as the country’s major actors recoiled from taking decisive actions for fear of detonating the very cataclysm they had sought to avoid. Much has been made of the weakness and indecision of Nicholas II, but by those fateful last years the anachronistic Romanoff dynasty was collapsing and little could be done to stop it. 

Henry goes on for a couple of pages. It's the best description of our situation I have read.

P. S. Wikipedia has a page about Perpetual War.