Yesterday I told you how the US federal debt level is expanding at its fastest rate since the financial crisis.

This isn’t supposed to be happening.

The financial crisis is years behind us. The economy is supposedly on solid footing. The government keeps gushing about how much tax revenue they’re collecting.

Usually when government debt expands so rapidly it’s because they’re waging war, fighting a major recession, or financing some serious infrastructure projects.

But none of these things are happening.

Think about it– yesterday I told you that the debt is now $19.5 trillion. The debt hit $18.5 trillion in November of last year… meaning that they added $1 trillion to the national debt in just 10 months.

What did you get for that $1 trillion? Did they defeat ISIS? Give everyone a massive tax rebate? Recapitalize all of their insolvent trust funds?

Nope. Nada. They made a trillion dollars vanish into thin air and have absolutely nothing to show for it.

That’s because an absolutely astonishing level of spending (and waste) is built into the system now.

Just keeping the lights on, i.e. simply paying interest on the national debt, plus all the mandatory entitlement programs, burns through almost 100% of their tax revenue.

This means that they have to go into debt to finance nearly everything we think of as government, from fake airport security to the national parks to the Internal Revenue Service.

To be fair, this approach has worked well for years. The US government has had an ample supply of lenders willing to fund its largess…CONTINUE READING