The greatest threat to the United States is that we are used to spending far, far more money than we actually have. We've adapted our entire economy towards taking money and letting the Federal Government spend it, mostly on maintaining the world's largest army but also on a vast array of bureaucracy and miscellaneous mandates on everything from not bothering to regulate imports to throwing money at schools with no conception of how to do it well.
The biggest single source of that money is the Baby Boomers. They've loaned us that money at extraordinary interest, on the order of 5%, with a rock-solid guarantee, at a time when the banks are paying out less than 1% interest in many savings accounts.
They're about to start demanding all of that money back (they started officially a few weeks ago), to the tune of
$2.5 trillion. Worse, they're actually entitled to even more money than that over the next 50 years or so, since it's in the form of a defined-benefit pension.
Even in the years when we supposedly had a surplus, that was only because we didn't count the egregious amount of money that we were borrowing from the Baby Boomers at usurious rates. They got to be on both ends of the situation, running the government and setting the rates as well as lending the money, setting obligations on their children and grandchildren to pay it back. They twisted the rules so that we didn't even recognize it was a deficit; they counted the loans as income!
Over the next 20 years or so, we're going to find it harder and harder to maintain the world's largest army because we're used to funding it with deficit spending (like I said, even in surplus years it was really a deficit). Now that we're locked into a war that will last decades and decades, the Baby Boomers are going to drop out of the economy and start demanding their loans back.
That's going to make it even harder for us to borrow money, and we're going to have to start paying even MORE interest. And this time we're going to have to borrow it from foreign countries, putting ourselves in their debt.
We're going to have to cut back spending, and there's no way we can afford to continue to fund the military at the size it is. That's going to put us in extreme jeopardy.
Thanks, Mom and Dad.
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