Economic crisis facing United States

When I was working at the old St. Louis Globe-Democrat in the mid 1980s, our employer was one of those wing-and-a-prayer entrepreneurs who didn't have much money.

Time and again, paydays passed without any checks, and there were other times when the checks would come, they would be suspiciously rubbery.

My colleagues and I used to joke that our chances of surviving were like "fish (waste) on the bottom of the ocean," because there was nothing lower. We were right. The guy went out of business owing each of us thousands of dollars.

These days when I look at the U.S. economy, particularly at historically high unemployment and almost unimaginable federal debt, I feel a lot like I did in the '80s.

Our chances of surviving this and returning to some sort of "good old days" are not particularly good.

Let me pose a hypothetical question. If you were on a ship you knew was going to sink, and your chances of escaping were pretty good, but telling the other passengers would cause a panic and hurt your chances, what would you do?

Well, I don't have any inside knowledge, but I am intelligent enough -- and enough of a faithful student of history -- to know that within 10 or 20 years, the excrement is going to hit the fan for the United States of America.

I'm not going to make this a partisan post, because there's plenty of blame to go around for both parties. But if you look at the federal debt, and the projected deficits of more than $1 trillion a year for the next decade or so, we are reaching a point where we cannot grow, tax or cut spending enough ever to pay that money back.

Eight years ago, we were on track to pay down the National Debt in a decade or so. Now we're at a point where all we will be able to do at some point is default on it.

Think about this: A decade or so from now, at current projections, the National Debt will be around $20 trillion. That puts just servicing that debt at more than $800 billion a year, and that's like making the minimum payment on your credit card.

We will reach a point where there is no money for anything else, and where government borrowing completely freezes private borrowers out of the market.

What happens then? Think of the collapse of 2008 -- on steroids.

At some point we'll see hyperinflation, and we'll probably see unemployment at twice the level it's at now. The government won't have the financial ability to do much to help, so probably the only orders coming out of Washington will be to shoot looters.

Can this be prevented?

Maybe, but the hour is awfully late and there is little political courage in Washington. One of the reasons I believe in single-payer health care is that I think it would actually save money, but that isn't going to happen.

What we need to do is slash almost all subsidies and protective tariffs, letting the strong thrive and hoping the weak survive. We need to slash defense spending by at least half and probably more. For one thing, we can tell our allies that they don't get a free ride on defense any longer. They have to start paying for their own national security.

We need a president like Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin D. Roosevelt, who will tell us we're going to have to suffer before we can get healthy again. We haven't had a president like that for a long time.

Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill once said that Americans will always do the right thing, but sometimes they have to try every other alternative first.

We have lived very well for a very long time, and a lot of us have lived well beyond our means. I'm not at all sure we're strong enough to do what it takes, but we need to try.

Otherwise, there's a very good possibility we may be the last generation of Americans to really enjoy what our country was meant to be.