American Insanity Is Debt Financed

Since 2007, the U.S. has heavily relied on debt to support its high standard of living. This has strongly contributed to the proliferation of total nonsense in public affairs.

A couple of years ago I met a man in his late seventies who is still working as an electrician. A Vietnam War veteran, he still enjoyed wiring houses and was very good at it. He was still in good health, still drove the same truck he’d been driving for years, and was still married to the same woman he’d wed not long after he came home from Vietnam.

In conversation about different subjects, including public affairs, he came off as moderate and perfectly reasonable. In other words, he was, it seemed to me, an exemplar of that rarest of humans in today’s America—a grownup.

If you work with electricity, you cannot afford to have any illusions about it. If you make a mistake while wiring an appliance or replacing old wiring and circuitry, it could horribly injure, blind, or kill you.

Since 2007, it has often occurred to me that the proliferation of bizarre obsessions, narcissistic fantasies, petty squabbling, virtue signaling, and touchy identity politics is an expression of America maintaining its high standard of living through debt financing. The revelations coming out of Elon Musk’s DOGE have confirmed my suspicion.

When people are not constrained by reality in their daily lives and work their fantasies and delusions run wild. I suspect that more than half of all government jobs consist of doing total BS activities that have nothing to do with producing and delivering a real product or service.

Heaven forbid we have a major financial crisis in this country, as it would cause untold economic hardship and social unrest. Such a crisis would, however, terminate our Age of Delusional Nonsense.

Financing of the U.S. National Debt has exceeded 1 trillion per year.