[The] former head of Goldman Sachs, John Whitehead, was also the former head of the New York Federal Reserve. And I met with him, and he said as soon as the Fed stops buying all the debt that we’re issuing—which they’ve been doing, the Fed’s buying like three-quarters of the debt that America issues. He said, once that’s over, he said we’re going to have a failed Treasury auction, interest rates are going to have to go up. We’re living in this borrowed fantasy world, where the government keeps on borrowing money. You know, we borrow this extra trillion a year, we wonder who’s loaning us the trillion? The Chinese aren’t loaning us anymore. The Russians aren’t loaning it to us anymore. So who’s giving us the trillion? And the answer is we’re just making it up. The Federal Reserve is just taking it and saying, “Here, we’re giving it.” It’s just made up money, and this does not augur well for our economic future. You know, some of these things are complex enough it’s not easy for people to understand, but your point of saying, bankruptcy usually concentrates the mind. – Mitt Romney, May 2012

He’s not making this up. This is the honest truth. The Chinese might even dump about a trillion in our bonds and another trillion in Japanese bonds, further burdening both our central bank and the Bank of Japan with those debt burdens. Tax cuts make the deficit worse. Spending cuts would have to be not $1.2 trillion over ten years, but about $1.5 trillion right now to balance the budget – which would likely wreck the Treasury Department’s “rescue” of the major banks… aaaaand there goes the banking sector!

On average, major economic collapses like the one we had in 2008 see a 180% increase in sovereign debt. We’re still about $6 trillion away from that benchmark. It won’t matter which party is in Congress or the White House: those numbers are relentless in their historic precedents. While it could be better, it could also be much, much worse – and there’s plenty of underlying instability and unaccounted-for losses to trigger a much worse knock-on disaster to the current situation.

I said it makes no difference which party runs things in regards to this problem. Perhaps the reason it’s not being discussed in the national media is that we, as a people, will realize that neither party will make a difference and, in that realization, stop dividing ourselves with anger over issues that distract us from how the nation has been sold out from under us.