A sobering thought

In the end, there is only the debt. [Link]

Amid all the fighting over health care, Obama's new promises, the Israeli spat, the Frum controversy, et al., looms the national debt. We can ignore it; get angry at it and say, "What the hell, I'll quadruple it!"; have our "experts" write sophistic treatises about how it either doesn't matter or is in truth good; hear our politicians claim it is secondary to the passing of a "progressive" agenda; or secretly smile that its service will require higher taxes and more "redistributive change"; but in the end, what we as a nation collectively owe others and ourselves transcends politics.

Cranky 19th-century-minded farmers used to preach about the tentacles of low interest. Apparently they had this strange idea that when interest rates went too low, the uninformed mob-like masses borrowed too much — and the resulting live-for-today demand for cheap money forced the once-endless pool of ready loans to dry up and interest to rise — and a few smarter people were sticking around to profit when this cycle played out like clockwork.