How does it feel to have the largest government that the planet has ever seen? When I was growing up, I was taught that we had a capitalist system and that we had a limited federal government. Of course neither of those things has been true for a very long time. Today, the United States has the biggest government in the history of the world, and it gets even bigger with each passing year. Running that gigantic government requires more money than we actually have, and so we are going into staggering amounts of debt.

But there is no way that our politicians will ever agree to reduce the size of the federal government to an appropriate size. So we are stuck with this system until the day when it finally collapses.

We have reached a stage where most U.S. households are at least partially dependent on the federal government.

We very much prefer not to call ourselves “socialists”, but that is precisely what we are. Sadly, if we attempted to go back to the way things were 100 years ago, most Americans would not know how to survive.

Let me give you some numbers that illustrate what I am talking about…

– Approximately 3 million people work directly for the federal government.

– The federal government spent 6.13 trillion dollars in 2023. That figure is larger than the GDP of every nation on the entire planet except for the U.S. and China.

– More than 70 million Americans are on Social Security.

– More than 65 million Americans are on Medicare.

– More than 81 million Americans are on Medicaid.

– More than 41 million Americans are on food stamps.

Of course there are many more programs that hand out money to the population on a regular basis.

The massively bloated federal government that so many of us depend upon constantly consumes enormous mountains of money.

We cannot provide enough money to keep it going, and so the federal government has been piling up insane amounts of debt.

Since 1980, the size of the U.S. national debt has gone from 1 trillion dollars to 34 trillion dollars.

The combined wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Ken Griffin, Mark Cuban, Ray Dalio and George Soros would not be enough to even pay the interest on our national debt for a single year…

The combined net worth of the most prominent billionaires in the United States would not be enough to pay a single year’s interest payment on America’s ballooning national debt, which currently stands at an astonishing $34 trillion.

The combined net worth of some of America’s most prominent billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Ken Griffin, Mark Cuban, Ray Dalio, and George Soros, adds up to approximately $726 billion according to data compiled by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Meanwhile, the net interest on our national debt is currently at $730.8 billion, dwarfing the sum for previous years.

We are now at a point where the national debt has become a major national crisis, and the percentage of Americans that believe that our politicians should do something about this has been going up…

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 57% of Americans said reducing the budget deficit should be a top priority for the president and Congress, up from 45% the year prior.

But the politicians in Washington don’t have the stomach to do anything about the wild spending.

They know that if we tried to live within our means, it would instantly plunge the U.S. economy into a horrifying economic depression.

And voters wouldn’t like that at all.

So instead they are just going to try to keep the party going for as long as they can.

In fact, the size of the federal deficit in December was 52 percent larger than for the same month a year earlier…

The U.S. federal government posted a December deficit of $129 billion, up $44 billion or 52% from a year earlier as outlays rose while receipts fell from December 2022 levels that were swelled by pandemic-deferred tax payments, the U.S. Treasury Department said on Thursday.

The Treasury said that outlays for December rose 3% to $559 billion, a December record, partly as a result of higher Social Security outlays and interest on the public debt. Receipts for the month fell 6% to $429 billion.

America’s “empire of money” really has reached the endgame.

Our debt spiral is out of control, our currency is rapidly losing value, and everyone can see that our entire system will inevitably collapse.

But for the moment, the talking heads on television continue to tell everyone that our leaders know exactly what they are doing, and millions of people actually believe that nonsense.

Written by Michael Snyder for The Economic Collapse ~ January 17, 2024