Ok so let me make this clear.  I am not an economist.  I didn't take economics while at school.  In my early adult days I had little interest in the topic.  But over time I came to understand that knowing at least the basics of how the economy worked helped me understand what economists where talking about.  So I learned gradually, over time.

Then there is also pure and simple common sense.  You have a certain amount of money coming in, you have a certain amount of expenses going out.  Hopefully more is coming in than going out.  When more is going out than coming in, we all know this is flatly absolutely positively unsustainable activity.  Sooner or later you simply have nothing left to give out, and nobody will lend you a dime brother, not after that.

Makes sense, yes?  Need a PHD in economics?  No.  Need to have John Nash explain it to you?  No.

In the news today was a story that Pennsylvania was actively contemplating bankruptcy as a budgetary strategy.  And the capital of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, was in dire financial straights.  (Note I didn't invest the time to understand what put Harrisburg in that unenviable position).  New Jersey is battered and on the rocks.  New York is hammered, and the great and kooky state of California is one UnGodly mess.

Much of this is about debt.  And, in my opinion, it's not being talked about enough in the press.  Perhaps because it's dry and boring, I don't know.

Here is the simple concept:  Nationally we have been suffering from a financial psychosis where the majority of us, including some very smart people, demanded an ever increasing amount of services from our Governments, but we balked at actually paying for it.  Perhaps this psychosis has it roots in the Great Depression and the Roosevelt Administration's shift from largely self-reliance to entitlement.

So now many of us have bought into the kool-aid elixir that the government 'owes us', when in fact, it does not.

Thus, in order to maintain the increasingly 'you owe me' attitude of The Stupid Nation, our State and Federal Governments have been borrowing and borrowing to keep those voters fat, dumb, relatively happy, and most of all - at home and out of the polling booth.  'You owe me' in a perverse way helps breed apathy (that would be another amateur psycho-analysis post all by itself).

This is my trademark long-winded wind up to the point:  Generally speaking many state residents are screaming bloody murder about taxes.  And the same applied to Federal taxes as well.  They're too high, we say.  We can take no more, we say.   You must cut State employee roles, trim nutso-generous pension plans, medical benefit plans to die for, cut back on wages, and so on - just so long as those precious services we collectively like aren't touched.  It's stupid, oh yes it is, and it's also hilarious, and sad all at once.

The problem with cutting "fat" out of Government is that, at least in many states, it's not the spending on services that's the main problem.  It's the spending to support the debt service these governments have accumulated over a generation or more.  The debt service in California, New Jersey, and New York as prime examples, is staggering.  And all the money that goes to servicing the debt, cannot go to paying for the services we don't want cut but refuse to pay for.  So our taxes are high, and they stay high because we have to pay off the borrowed money, and we still have to provide those pesky services.

What a mind-boggling mess.  And it's our fault people - the Government failed The People because The People failed the Government.  In a democracy, voters ultimately are to blame, either because they voted stupidly, as so many did electing Obama into office, or because they didn't vote at all.

Nothing at the state level can remotely compare to the absolute obscene orgy of borrowing currently going on at the Federal Government at this very moment.  How can supposedly very smart people be so unbelievably dumb?   How can you claim sanity and pile one block of trillion dollar debt on after another?  You really have only two possible conclusions as to why the Obama Administration and the Democrats would do this:  Spectacular stupidity, or sinister intentional destruction of the United States.  Obama is a Marxist, and he is an ideologue despite his lies claiming the contrary.  And thus, we cannot help ourselves but wonder about what the hell Obama thinks he is doing.

The more debt we pile on, the ever smaller the fiscal margins are for us to be able to react to another calamity without it bringing down the entire nation.  It's like Mount Saint Helens all over again - the volcano slowly rotted from the inside out, and then collapsed under pressure in a sudden horrific cataclysm.

Iceberg, right ahead....HARD RIGHT!