There are obvious reasons why he would say this: a staggering debt puts on a road to national insolvency, cripples our ability to finance our own defense, puts us in a place where interest payments consume more than the defense budget, etc.
Other reasons include who actually holds our debt. The Chinese buy up our debt and continue to float us loans; this in effect means we're mortgaging our future to China, as well as other countries. Can we seriously expect this to not adversely affect our foreign affairs?
Worst of all, the debt and unfunded liabilities put us on a path to certain serfdom, to borrow from Hayek, in that we will implode upon ourselves. We will one day have no one to buy up our debt to fund the ever-growing entitlement rolls. At that point we will either raise income taxes to a crushing level wherein we become Sweden, Jr. and nearly completely wreck our creative market capabilities, or we will face a banana republic scenario where the tax payers put up a tax revolt in the face of massive redistribution or the the tax consumers revolt in demand of the entitlements the demagogue pass-the-buck politicians have promised over the decades.
A well done documentary on the debt is I.O.U.S.A. One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt
. (There is a 30 minute version on Youtube. I attempted to embed and upload the video here, but the embed has been disabled. You can link to it here.) The documentary features David Walker, former Comptroller of the U.S., Government Accountability Office under Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton and currently president and CEO of the Peterson Foundation.
The video was completed in 2007 and focuses much time on the acceleration of the debt under Bush 43. It also relates the debt-to-GDP ratio of past administrations and times. How chilling to think what has been piled on since 2007.
I recommend this documentary to everyone. We cannot stay on this path of insolvency. The U.S. cannot survive if it does, and individual freedom certainly will take a back seat to the dire fiscal circumstances that debt will bring upon us.
