Economic collapse, American style

Sometimes I wonder about this country. It seems that once our national debt bill comes due---and it will, sooner rather than later---taxes will have to go up while government services go down just to keep the Chinese from invading to take a pound of flesh for all of our bad debt (worth about as much as General Motors corporate bonds at this point) that they've bought over the years as a sort of land claim policy. Meanwhile, I'm getting ever closer to affluence in the form of the high-paying jobs my college education will land me by the time I'm forty.

My wife brought up an interesting idea---using Canada as a springboard to EU citizenship (via the UK). I'm not keen on living in Britain, but the broader subject of emigration so I'll at least get something worthwhile for my tax dollars (er, tax euros) looks more and more like an attractive option. If the Obama administration keeps it up, they'll add more to the national debt in four years than George W. Bush added in eight and we'll start to see either a massive shift toward income inequality (more so than our worse-than-the-world-average inequality we've got now) or an exodus as the wealthy hightail it out of the country and run their American corporate businesses from tax havens like Monaco or the Cayman Islands.

Not that I'm ever going to be that rich, but life in the Netherlands or Germany (or the Czech Republic or even Hungary, two of the wealthier former Soviet-bloc countries) looks more and more attractive the more I realize that it's my generation that's going to get killed by the last nine years of American political profligacy.