It doesn’t matter which of these figures is correct, and it was a complete waste of time running the numbers. The worst case is 716 percent? And the best is 280 percent? That’s a choice between dead and deader. Who cares?

If either number is right, there isn’t going to be a 2080, not for America.

You can spend a month ploughing through the CBO statistics, but the numbers don’t matter because they all make the same point: under no likely scenario does America’s debt burden do anything but go up. Whether it’s Cloud-Cuckoo Land up or Planet Zongo up is mere details. Nothing is certain but debt and taxes. And then more debt. If the government of the United States had to use GAAP (the “Generally Accepted Accounting Practices” that your company and mine and the publishers of this book have to use), Uncle Sam would be under an SEC investigation and his nephews and nieces would have taken away the keys and cut up his credit cards. By 2010, the federal government was issuing about $100 billion of Treasury bonds every month—or, to put it another way, Washington is dependent on the bond markets being willing to absorb an increase in federal debt equivalent to the GDP of Canada or India—every year.²⁷ While India’s growing its economy, we’re growing our debt to match. We’re asking the world to dump the equivalent of a G7 nation into U.S. Treasury debt every Christmas.

So let’s take it to the next stage: we know American government has outspent America. What happens if it outspends the entire planet?

John Kitchen of the U.S. Treasury and Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin published a study in 2010 entitled: Financing U.S. Debt: Is There Enough Money in the World—and At What Cost?²⁸

The fact that sane men are even asking this question ought to be deeply disturbing. As to the answer, foreign official holdings of U.S. Treasury securities have usually been less than 5 percent of the rest of the world’s GDP.

By 2009, they were up to 7 percent. By 2020, Kitchen and Chinn project them to rise to about 19 percent of the rest of the world’s GDP, which they say is… do-able.

Whether the rest of the world will want to do it is another matter. A future that presumes the rest of the planet will sink a fifth of its GDP into U.S. Treasuries is no future at all. But on Big Government’s streetcar named Desire we have come to depend on the kindness of strangers.

If something cannot go on forever, it can still go on long enough—especially if you enjoy bookkeeping advantages the government denies to the private sector. And the idea that “you and your colleagues will take action” to reverse it, or at least end it, or maybe just slow it down a wee bit, flies in the face of that Heritage graph. The one thing that can be said for certain is that the political class, whether led by Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, or the usual reach-across-the-aisle Republican accommodationists, or even the Gingrichite revolutionaries of 1994, will not take meaningful, transformative action.

That leaves Director Elmendorf’s alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah:

Some collapse down the road.

And you’ll be surprised how short that road is.

TEKEL…

Two propositions. First, Adam Smith, after the Battle of Saratoga, in reply to a friend despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain:

Alternatively, Samuel Huntington in his final book, Who Are We?

Who’s right?