Did you know that if you took every single penny away from everyone in the United States that it still would not be enough to pay off the national debt? Today, the debt of the federal government exceeds $145,000 per household, and it is getting worse with each passing year. Many believe that if we paid it off a little bit at a time that we could eventually pay it all off, but as you will see below that isn’t going to work either.

And of course it isn’t just our 18 trillion dollar national debt that we need to be concerned about. Overall, Americans are a total of 58 trillion dollars in debt.  35 years ago, that number was sitting at just 4.3 trillion dollars. There is no way in the world that all of that debt can ever be repaid. The only thing that we can hope for now is for this debt bubble to last for as long as possible before it finally explodes.

It shocks many people to learn that our debt is far larger than the total amount of money in existence. Alternatively, could we just start spending less than we bring in and start paying down the national debt a little bit at a time?

Perhaps that may have been true at one time, but now we are really up against a wall.  Our rapidly aging population is going to put an enormous amount of stress on our national finances in the years ahead.

But even now things are a giant mess. We are told that “deficits are under control”, but that is a massive hoax that is based on accounting gimmicks. During fiscal year 2014, the U.S. national debt increased by more than a trillion dollars. That is not “under control” – that is a raging national crisis.

Many believe that that we could improve the situation by raising taxes. Since the end of World War II, the amount of tax revenue taken in by the federal government has fluctuated in a range between 15 and 20 percent of GDP no matter what tax rates have been. I believe that it is possible to get up into the low twenties, but that would also be very damaging to our economy and the American public would probably throw a huge temper tantrum.

The real problem, of course, is our out of control spending. During the past two decades, spending by the federal government has grown 63 percent more rapidly than inflation.

For the moment, the rest of the world is lending us gigantic mountains of money at ridiculously low interest rates. However, if the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt was just to return to the long-term average, we would be spending more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt.

As I discussed above, there isn’t enough money in our entire system to even pay off a significant chunk of that debt. So what happens when the total amount of debt in a society vastly exceeds the total amount of money? Is there any way out other than collapse?