It takes life energy to pay off debts. A country that just continually gets in more debt and doesn’t even try to live within its means is a country that is ok with stealing the life of future generations to pay their debts for them. Why don’t politicians balance the budget? They are cowards that don’t care about the future generations. They only care about getting re-elected. We have somewhere between 12 and 15 years before all Social Security money is gone. The debt payments in a decade are going to be so massive, they will swallow up all entitlement spending at which point there will be no money to pay for entitlements unless entitlements are slashed massively or taxes are raised massively. Oh, and things in our culture are so unhealthy that birthrates are plummeting because people don’t want to have kids in this environment. That will make things much worse.  Either way crushing times ahead unless our country and its leaders humble themselves and try to start paying down their debts now. The alternative is hard default and loss of faith in our currency or hyperinflation. These are both worst case scenarios, and max pain and at the moment we are headed towards one of these being reality.  Sidenote, the theory which says there are no consequences for endless money printing has thoroughly been debunked as we have seen the last couple years. There are massive consequences to printing money, and that road leads to hyperinflation. Want proof? Powell is literally destroying the American economy right now to try to get inflation down a few percentage points and throwing us into a recession because of it. He ultimately won’t succeed. We will end up with high inflation and a recession. but his desperate efforts should be a signal to how serious bad inflation is.  This is one of the most serious issues we will face in our lifetime and something in which you should use to judge the qualification of a leader. If they are not talking about this, they are not a serious politician.  Everything else is like a little tiny wave approaching us while a massive tsunami several miles out is also heading towards us, but not being talked about.