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........

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