We are already bankrupt. We owe somewhere between 120-200 trillion dollars when you consider the national debt and all the unfunded liabilities like Medicare, Social Security and federal pensions. It WILL NOT be changed until it implodes.
Why? People want the government to do and provide these things. People want the government to leave the debt for someone else to pay. People feel, like a previous poster, that it is the federal governments job to pay for college and food and healthcare and roads when in fact, none of those things are the federal governments job based on the Constitution. People here, on a homesteading board, want these things and actually have no knowledge that: it's not in the Feds constitutional authority and that we can't afford any of it.
We borrow 40% of what we spend now and a HUGE number of Americans want MORE! They don't even CARE that we are leaving that debt to the next 50 generations and that their standard of living will suck. It's all about them. They don't even realize that money actually DOES come "out of a printer", it's called a printing press and that is the biggest part of the problem, we own the one the world uses.
For decades the federal government has just kept printing more money when they need it. The speed they do this with has increased exponentially recently. Every time they print more dollars, a dollar buys a little less. People that understand call it the "hidden tax" and realize it is the biggest, most oppressive, most destructive tax we pay in this country.
The government fools the ignorant by saying "hey, inflation only went up 1.2% last year". What they don't say is that those numbers don't include food or energy or the loss of purchasing power for our fiat currency due to the government printing more money. You want to know what the real inflation numbers are? Go here:
http://www.chapwoodindex.com/
"The Chapwood Index reflects the true cost-of-living increase in America. Updated and released twice a year, it reports the un-adjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top 500 items on which Americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the nation."
We are screwed because Americans will NEVER give up their handouts and politicians will NEVER take them away. We are dead men walking. It will be over when it ends and not before, then the long suffering will begin.
But hey, don't despair. Just look at it like 80% of Americans do now. They figure they'll be dead and don't even care that it will be their descendants that get to clean up the mess.