Like the case of Rome before it, Empire is bankrupting America. The true fiscal cost of the national security budget is now upwards of $1.3 trillion per year (counting veterans expense and international operations and aid), but there is no way to pay for it.

That’s because the 78-million strong Baby Boomers are in the driver’s seat of American politics. They plainly will not permit the $3.5 trillion per year retirement and health care entitlements-driven Welfare State to be curtailed. At the same time, Washington has become the War Capital of the World where the ruling UniParty insists that the massive fiscal claims of the Warfare State are non-negotiable.

Indeed, during 2017-2020 the Trumpite/GOP already sealed the deal. Trump massively increased the Warfare State budget, even as the Congressional GOP refused to reform Social Security and Medicare and proved to be utterly incapable of even laying a glove politically on Obamacare/Medicaid, Food Stamps or any of the other Welfare State entitlements. Meanwhile, the GOP remained all-in for its anti-tax allergy, thereby refusing to tax the American public to close Washington’s yawning deficits.

the outlook is now so dire that the CBO doesn’t even dare print the long-term debt numbers. Instead, it attempts to camouflage the catastrophe ahead by expressing the data in more cosmetic “% of GDP” terms without actually printing the underlying GDP figures.

CBO projected that nominal GDP would grow by the modest figure of 3.8% per annum for the next 30 years. In whole numbers that puts the nominal GDP at $85 trillion by 2054; and applying the 172% of GDP figure for the public debt results in a sum of $146 trillion!

America is racing toward a debt Armageddon at $146 trillion—implying interest expense of $7.5 trillion per year

Unfortunately, the generation which marched on the Pentagon in 1968 against the insanity and barbarism of LBJ’s Vietnam War has long since abandoned the cause of peace. So doing, boomers have acquiesced in the final ascendancy of the Warfare State, which grew like Topsy once the US became the world’s sole superpower after the Soviet Union disappeared into the dustbin of history in 1991.

In short order (under Bush the Elder and the Clintons) Washington morphed into the War Capital of the World, and became an imperial beehive not only of militarism, but of an endless complex of think-tanks, NGOs, advisories and consultancies, “law firms”, lobbies and racketeers.