National Debt Reaches $15.222 Trillion

It's a new high, and I'm not talking about the euphoria of drugs. What's high is national debt, tripping every American's stone sober psyche at $15,222,940,045,451 as the nation closed its books at year end 2011.

Wow. If that doesn't take your breath away, consider this. America's debt stands at 100.3 percent of GDP. This means that the nation owes more than what the nation produces of value. Get it? We spend more than we make. That makes our economy unsustainable, to use a favored word of the spenders when speaking of something else.

Another way to bring home the meaning to every man, woman, and child is to say that every man, woman, and child owes the government 50,000 dollars. Each! If you are a man, woman, or child, add fifty thousand dollars to your credit card debt, even if you don't have a credit card, because the government will get it from you, your spouse, your kids, and their kids in other ways.

Those other ways include taxes or licenses on everything. Sales tax, income tax, estate tax, tax on everything from soup to nuts, along with licenses you'll pay money for, for government to give you the privilege of letting you do something. This, so that government can spend while it spends even more than it collects from all of us put together. Is this any way to run a government? Of course not. Some have suggested it is government's design for decline.

When Greece, along with other bankrupt European governments, ramped up debt to more than their national GDP, people rioted in the streets. Governments shut down or came apart at the seams. Unemployment skyrocketed. No jobs were to be had. Businesses closed. People with any mobility at all crossed borders and left their homes behind.

Such economic disasters remind me of California, where natives are leaving their homelands for Texas, Virginia, North Dakota, North Carolina, to name the few prosperous states that exist in this nation. They have the discipline to balance their budgets and curb spending to sensible levels. They do not allow the outrageous level of debt that characterizes the country.

I'm not one for numbers, but the one that measures national debt in dollars got my attention. Bring home the meaning of our national debt in any way that makes sense to you personally. Let the enormity of it sink in. Then consider how long the country can run on this debt-induced high. And know that some kind of debacle has got to be coming.

The worst part will be knowing that we stood in a stupor and let it happen.