US Heading For Financial Trouble?

The US weakens its own security by borrowing vast sums from China and other nations to pay for reckless spending with little accountability. The nation, by not reducing spending or restructuring its health-care system over the next 20 years, will have to prepare for bankruptcy, insists David Walker, the US comptroller general, who has gone on tour to urge voters and politicians to oppose the mounting debt. Promises of Social Security and Medicare for the growing segment of retired citizens cannot be met. "I would argue that the most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but our own fiscal irresponsibility," Walker said to journalist Steve Kroft during an interview for CBS’s 60 Minutes. If the US does not reduce spending soon, the taxes of future generations will go toward paying off merely the debt’s interest – and the nation’s children and grandchildren will lack money to pay for their own education, research, health care, foreign aid, defense – or any other measures that contribute to a nation’s security. – YaleGlobal