This is a country that lacks both the courage and the conviction to raise taxes on its population in order to balance its budget and thereby run a sound and fiscal federal government, nor does our country have the will to reduce expenses, expenditures, and budgets in order to help accomplish that goal. While there are plenty of other nations that suffer from the same problem, none are of the size, the girth, and influence as the United States. Additionally, there are numerous countries that don't run a fiscal deficit; in fact they currently have surpluses, in which of note we have South Korea, Norway, and Brazil. America has not always been this profligate, and we need only go back to as recently as the years of 1998-2001 in which our federal government actually ran a surplus in each of those years to demonstrate that, but since that time American has become especially imprudent as in each of the years of 2009-2012, our deficits were the highest the country has ever experienced since its creation, even adjusting for inflation for the World War II deficit spending years. That obviously bodes very poorly for our country's fiscal responsibility going forward.
These massive federal deficits are essentially an unfair and unauthorized taxation on our youngest generation and on generations of Americans to come. America has borrowed again and again against its future to pay for guns and butter today. To make matters worse, the United States simply won't own up to the fact that its spending and deficits are out of control and fiscally irresponsible. To hear House Minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, recently state that: "the cupboard is bare, there's no more cuts to make," in regards to the federal budget is to know that America is morally bankrupt and on firm footing for complete fiscal bankruptcy.
Business cycles of booms and busts are pretty much the historic norm, despite the belief that government can control or mitigate these cycles. Consequently, in lean years, it is not surprising that our federal government will run a deficit that is to be expected, but within those lean years, there should be mandated a fiscal tightening on the government itself, but in fact that isn't happening at all. While incomes for the majority of Americans have been stagnate for almost two generations, those that live and work in the surrounding areas around Washington DC have seen an explosion in their income gains. The reason for this is as simple as the closer you are to the power source, the further up in the food chain you are especially to the contracts, contacts, and to the lobbyists, the bigger the slice of pie that you will reap and those that touch the money first always get the most benefit from it. Those that are connected will reap the biggest benefits of a federal budget currently in the neighborhood of $3.5 trillion.
America is playing a shell game with its taxpayers, it's rigged, it's wrong, and it can't go on forever. No child likes to be told "no", no man likes to be denied, nobody really likes to lose, but the reality of the situation is that when anybody tries to be all things to everybody, in-discriminatory, undisciplined, unprincipled, unscrupulous, self-centered, and double dealing, it will end with everybody receiving a really raw deal.