Endless Spending and Endless Misery- Making America Broke Again

The United States has taken on unsustainable military spending and is clearly on a path for economic catastrophe and ruin.

American Self-Image of Unlimited Historical Power Is Out of Line With Reality

I am reminded of a rhyme penned by an Englishman in response to the American default on bonds in the 1840s, which I first encountered around age 15 in a high school history class. “Yankee Doodle borrows cash, Yankee Doodle spends it, and then he snaps his fingers at the jolly flat who lends it. Ask him when he means to pay, He shows no hesitation but says he’ll take the shortest way, and that’s Repudiation!”

Of course, the rhyme was set to the well-known American tune of Yankee Doodle. Of course, in the 1830s you would have had to have been a jolly flat (unsophisticated, happy simpleton) to lend money to any government in the USA, as the Panic of 1837 and the defaults of the early 1840s proved.

The United States of 2026 is the preeminent world power and the main economic powerhouse of the world, for the time being, but republics rise and degenerate, empires are born and fall, systems collapse under their own weight when successive administrations or regimes repeat bad decision and entrench corrosive policies across generations. Endless spending financed by the printing press and by indebting future generations is only sustainable at the cost of the purchasing power of the currency and the standard of living of the populace…

Endless Debt and Endless War

At times such as these, in the opening weeks of spring 2026 (at the time I pen this), I occasionally ask myself, “How is the United States still able to obtain money? Who is actually financing all of this?” The United States monetizes its debt with true inflation rates anywhere from 8 to 20% per year and thus repays its creditors with debased and devalued currency. I lived through the 1980s and 1990s, and I remember a can of tuna fish being $0.25, a 2-piece Reese chocolate peanut butter cup being $0.35, a pack of cigarettes being $2.00, and a gallon of gas being $0.80 during intense local sales. No government bureaucrat will ever convince me that inflation is “only” two or three percent per year and that such has been the way of things for multiple decades. I am not quite 40 years old, but I have watched prices of most things double about two or three times in my lifetime. The candy bar that cost $0.25 in 1994 is now $2.00. Cigarettes that used to cost $2.00 per pack are now $8.00 to $12.00 per pack, depending on the particular brand (as an adult non-smoker, the price of cigarettes is far less interesting to me than it was when I was a teenage smoker back in “the day”).

The United States presently has a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 122.4% as of 2025 (it has been increasing since then),

It is noteworthy that most GDP gains in the USA in recent years have been inflationary gains due to the expansion of the money supply and have been the results of government spending policies, especially in regard to military Keynesianism.

As I contemplated the concept of debt to GDP, I began to ponder a simple question that requires research and unpacking in order to begin to answer. “Are heavily indebted nations more likely to engage in aggressive military action? Does a higher ratio of debt to GDP make aggressive war by the debtor, more likely?” The classic example would be Nazi Germany going heavily into debt to arm for a continent-wide war of aggression that the German militarists were planning before the ink was even dry on the treaties that ended World War One. Interestingly, the Nazi armaments program was often financed by neighboring nations, with the end result being the Nazis simply invaded those nations when the bills came due so as to occupy them, plunder them, install puppet governments, and cancel the debts. However, as flawed as the United States, France, and the UK are, I’m not going to get into hyperbolic exaggeration and claim they are modern manifestations of the Third Reich. There was a time when the United States, the British, and the French were aligned with Russia in fighting the Central Powers in WW1 and then the Axis Powers in WW2, but that era is apparently over, but that is perhaps a discussion best reserved and raised at another time.

So, the United States has a debt to GDP of nearly 125% as of 2024, which makes it one of the most indebted major industrial powers in the world. The USA is actually, as of 2024, apparently the 8th most indebted nation in the world by the metric of debt-to-GDP ratio. Meanwhile, Russia has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 21.4% as of 2025, making it one of the least indebted nations in the world and the least indebted major industrial power in the world.

Examination of Indebtedness Paired with Examination of Foreign Policies

I recently had a conversation with an NSA contractor who is a retired professor of engineering, and I inquired, “Do you think there is a correlation or a relationship between the indebtedness of a nation and the frequency with which it goes to war or utilizes military force to resolve international disputes or achieve foreign policy objectives?” He thought the idea was intriguing and suggested I do some basic reading and analysis on the matter to begin to gain insight into the matter.

Perhaps the first step is to determine where the major NATO powers wind up on the list of indebtedness.

USA: 122.4% (8th in the world as the most indebted nation)

France: 116.3% (just behind the USA as the 9th most indebted nation in the world)

Canada: 112.5% (just behind France as the 10th most indebted nation in the world)

United Kingdom: 103.9% (15th most indebted nation in the world)

Interestingly, while not a formal or official NATO member, Ukraine (arguably a NATO client/pawn) stands at 110% and is between France and the UK in indebtedness ranking.

As another interesting aside, a quick glance at Iran (which is often a target of NATO or Zionist aggression) reveals a debt-to-GDP ratio of 39.9% as of 2024.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that Russia’s debt to GDP is 21.4% as of 2025.

A Relationship Between Ruinous Spending and Reckless Militarism Seems Apparent

A pattern begins to emerge; although there is insufficient data or research on my end to call it causal or to proclaim “there is cause and effect,” however, there appears to be a strong correlation.

The nations that are most heavily indebted are typically very aggressive, militant, militarized, and are willing to foment wars, and regime changes and do whatever they have to in order to gain access to the resources of other nations, in the case of the USA, UK, Canada, France, and others, or they are co-opted by crooked local elites and put into the service of those global power gangsters, as in the case of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the nations that are fiscally responsible and avoid placing themselves into ruinous debt, such as Russia and Iran, find themselves the targets of the nations that have engaged in endless spending for endless militarization and the promotion of endless misery at home and abroad.

Americans, British, French, and Canadians, suffer tremendously declining, outright plummeting standards of living, with costs of living, housing, education, and healthcare surging, with military spending reaching record levels, for the benefit of a handful of globalist elites and those who are intimately involved in the military-industrial complex.

Other than the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 and the 1939-1940 Winter War with Finland, I cannot think of a single war initiated by the Soviet Union or Russia in the last 130 years. As to Iran, I cannot even think of one war started by Iran in the last 200 years. Almost every major war of the last 80-100 years was initiated by some combination of the USA, France, UK, or some client/satellite/puppet nation aligned with their bloc.

Trump to the American People: “We’re fighting wars; we can’t take care of children.”

President Trump himself has outright said the United States has no money for anything other than the military, and that Americans must accept tremendous budget cuts in all areas to accommodate an expansion of the military budget from $900 billion to $1.5 trillion.

Trump has said he wants to Make America Great Again, but he also said he would end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours, before being inaugurated, and yet here we are, approximately 18 months later, and no progress has been made, at least nothing substantial, nothing serious.

Somehow there is money for endless wars and endless wealth transfers to the military-industrial complex, but no money for anything else, not even the Great Wall of Trump that he promised along the southern border.

As I recall, Donald Trump claimed to have ended eight wars, even though in actuality he ended zero wars and started several new ones while helping to deepen and prolong others.

Although Trump did receive a second-hand Nobel Peace Prize that was originally bestowed on a subversive agitator (Maria Corina Machado) working with globalist technocrats to undermine Venezuela and try to deliver Venezuela into the hands of liberal internationalists to facilitate the plunder of the nation. As an aside, I don’t have much affinity for Maduro, since he’s a Marxist/Communist, but something is seriously wrong on the world stage if a nation can kidnap the sitting head of state of a fellow sovereign nation, especially during peacetime, while clearly angling to secure and plunder natural resources. The US fixation on Venezuela is not about curtailing communism, because the United States has plenty of communists running rampant in the USA, busily transitioning young children and ruining the upcoming generation, and if the USA wanted to pursue a campaign of anti-communism, it need not look to Latin America, as it has plenty of work to do here in the USA. The US fixation on Venezuela is simply about natural resources and removing a supplier of oil to China as well as removing a trade partner of Russia, one which happens to purchase Russian weapons for its defense, defense needs that generally only exist because of pressure and provocation from the USA.

All of this occurs to the backdrop of Marco Rubio telling Iran to stop spending money on war and start spending more on infrastructure (such as the bridges, hospitals, and schools the US and Israel have been purposely targeting and bombing).

Iran has a military budget of around $25 billion dollars; the US spent $900 billion and seeks to increase that to $1.5 *Trillion* dollars, but apparently Iran is the reckless spender in the eyes of America’s top diplomat.

To quote the immortal words of Ohio Congressman James Traficant, spoken on the floor of the Congress, “Beam me up, there’s no intelligent life here.”

True American Statesmen Warned About These Problems

We would do well to remember the words of President Eisenhower from 1953, which are as true today as they were when he spoke them in 1953-

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. There are two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Endless Spending for Endless War Benefits Epstein Regime Elite, Not Average Americans

The United States claims to be a power promoting peace and prosperity, but its foreign policy achievements demonstrate a clear track record of initiating conflicts, deepening conflicts, prolonging wars, and spreading instability via causing the collapse of legitimate and popular governments so they can be replaced with puppet regimes that have neither popularity nor legitimacy (see what happened in Assad’s Syria which was replaced with a terrorist Al Qaeda regime that has passively sat on its hands while Israel annexes large portions of southwestern Syria). Perhaps the most honest thing the US has done in recent years is to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War. If the US wants to get even more honest, Pete Hegseth could name himself the Secretary of War-Mongering.

America has endless money from the rank-and-file masses of its hapless and helpless citizenry, which it is willing and able to squander, to finance endless wealth transfers to merchants of death, but it has precious few dollars available for actual national security or infrastructure.

It is amazing people are still lending money to the United States government. It is also amazing that a core base of conservative, supposedly patriotic Americans are supporting what is clearly an Epstein regime that is only out for its own elites.

Bryan Anthony Reo is a licensed attorney based in Ohio and an analyst of military history, geopolitics, and international relations

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