Want to be scared?

If you're in the mood for a horror story in the making, spend some time considering this article in Maclean's, compliments of Mike. David Walker, comptroller general of the United States, and numerous other financial experts warn, Cassandra-like, of an impending economic crisis in the US of unthinkable proportion:

A trillion is a hard number to wrap your head around. Most people know it's a thousand billion -- 12 zeroes -- but even that is difficult to fathom in terms of value. So think of it like this: a trillion U.S. dollars is roughly the size of the entire Canadian economy. The world's six biggest oil companies had combined 2004 revenues just shy of US$1 trillion. And if you piled a trillion dollars in $1,000 bills, the stack would be more than 109 km [68 miles] high.

As of February, the U.S. national debt stood at US$7.7 trillion. And this year, the country is projecting another record deficit of US$427 billion, increasing its debt by about US$1.2 billion a day...

To most observers, it's becoming increasingly obvious that, within the next 10 years, the U.S. government will simply not be able to borrow money fast enough to keep up with its exploding expenses. That has huge implications for everything Americans do, from funding the military to protecting the environment. The Economic Policy Institute recently projected that under the current tax regime, by 2014 all government revenue would be consumed by four areas of spending: health care for the elderly and the poor, Social Security for retirees, national defence and interest on the debt. There will be no money left for such fundamental initiatives as education, transportation or justice, which means the government would be forced into ever-escalating borrowing to pay for basic programs. Walker's department projects that, under the current tax rates, interest costs on the skyrocketing national debt would be about half of all government tax revenues by 2031. Ten years later, the cost of servicing the debt will exceed all government revenues. [emphasis added]