You can run, but you cannot hide. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
The moral rot of unlimited debt looks “free” but it’s unaffordable in the end.
We like to think we’re special and this moment in history is special, but alas, we’re still running Wetware 1.0 which was coded between 300,000 and 60,000 years ago, when the last “out of Africa” migration finally got traction. Since then, the code has been tweaked a bit here and there (adults can now digest dairy products, etc.), but we’re running the old code, and so we make the same mistakes and follow the same emotional pathways as individuals and as groups.
Which leads us to our current predicament, which is not unique: we’re living on debt, “money” borrowed from the future, a future we’re assuming will be so over-supplied with energy and other goodies that we’ll be able to pay all the interest we’re piling up with ease.
All the charts below are shouting “parabolic,” as in crazy-unsustainable increases. There’s the federal debt, $36 trillion, up 4X from the 2008 spot of bother, there’s TCMDO, total public and private debt (McMansions, university degrees and SUVs all paid for with debt), student loans from zero to $1.5 trillion, Medicare and Medicaid, now 1/3 of the federal budget, and so on.
How did we get here? Let’s start with what’s not taught in Econ 101: primary surplus. Every economy–from households to empires, meaning this is scale-invariant–generates a surplus from its production of goods and services, or it runs a deficit, meaning it has to get more money from somewhere to support its consumption.
The question then becomes, how is the primary surplus being spent? (Or put another way, how is it being distributed across the economy and society?) There are only three options: 1) consume it, 2) invest it and 3) save it / hoard it.
Without making a conscious choice, the US has chosen to “invest” most of its primary surplus in moral rot, unproductive frauds, skims, scams, monopolies, cartels, regulatory capture, grift and graft.
The $366 billion debt jump in one day got memory holed fast and the $1.5 billion for Israel to build more bases is only available online.
As Jefferson said if a society expects to be ignorant and free it expects what never was and never will be.