Lest we not forget the national debt

With the mess that has been made of the credit and housing markets lately, its easy to forget about the national debt and other seemingly intractable problems that just keep getting pushed further and further into the future for someone else to solve.

The Gross National Debt

[Did these debt counters actually go in reverse back when we had those phony budget surpluses because borrowing from Social Security wasn't included?]

The whole idea of the national debt getting paid down without a serious debasement of the currency seems increasingly unlikely.

In fact, it looks like we'll continue to pile up even more debt with an even weaker currency - some day our foreign creditors will wise up and it probably won't be pretty.

The national debt doesn't seem to be getting too much attention from the presidential candidates these days, what with people losing their homes in record numbers and the pace set to pick up in 2008.

Maybe it's better that way.

Maybe it's better if the only attention the $9+ trillion national debt gets is from the occasional story like this one in today's edition of USAToday:

U.S. Debt: $30,000 per American
Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It's expanding by about $1.4 billion a day — or nearly $1 million a minute.

What's that mean to you?

It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States.

Even if you've escaped the recent housing and credit crunches and are coping with rising fuel prices, you may still be headed for economic misery, along with the rest of the country. That's because the government is fast straining resources needed to meet interest payments on the national debt, which stands at a mind-numbing $9.13 trillion.

And like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt — now at relatively low interest rates — rolling over to higher rates, multiplying the financial pain.

So long as somebody is willing to keep loaning the U.S. government money, the debt is largely out of sight, out of mind.

But the interest payments keep compounding, and could in time squeeze out most other government spending — leading to sharply higher taxes or a cut in basic services like Social Security and other government benefit programs. Or all of the above.

It sounds like they might have to get "innovative" in financing the government debt at some point - just look what "innovation" did for the housing market.

Maybe if house prices had kept going up, homeowners could have come up with $30,000 or so apiece and whittled the debt down, but with home values declining, that plan probably won't work now.