Will the United States ever collapse?

I’m usually accused of being too much of an optimist.

When someone tells me “global warming” I immediately think: good thing people are working on alt-energy solutions.

When someone tells me “automation will crush jobs” I think, “Well, look at what happened when ATMs supposedly were going to replace bank tellers. Nothing. The cost savings created a bank on every corner.”

When someone tells me I’m ugly, I think, “ok, you’re right. But I have a sense of humor.”

If someone says, “What about American debt rising so much?”, I go through the basic math:

– The US is $19 TRILLION in debt.

– BUT the US just has to pay $225 Billion a year to service that debt. That’s only 7% of GDP, down from 17% in the mid 90s. So we’re actually financially healthier than 20 years ago.

– and if you subtract out what the US owes the US (yes, we owe money to ourselves), then the national debt is just $13 Trillion and our debt obligations go down to about 3 or 4%.

If your salary was $100,000 and you had to pay just $4000 a year to service all of your debt, you would say, “no problem”.

Let’s take on more debt.