“What do you think is going to happen?” my friend asked, adding that most people he talked with believed the nation if not the world would suffer a major economic collapse in the next four years. Given the nation’s $16 trillion debt, plus another (according to one calculation) $84 trillion in unfunded liabilities, simple arithmetic suggests that a U.S. government default is inevitable, and that default would have world-wide repercussions.
For this very reason, many conservatives and Republicans argued that the recent election was the most important one in our lifetime, or at least in many years. Apparently, they believed (or wanted voters to believe) that they could somehow prevent this collapse–though if collapse is truly inevitable, by definition a single election couldn’t prevent it.
Now that Obama has won re-election, some people actually seem eager for the collapse in the hope that it will teach some kind of lesson to those foolish enough to vote for the wrong candidates in the recent election. Meanwhile, the web is filled with sites telling people what they need to hoard before the collapse comes (warning: annoying video starts as soon as page opens), or arguing that people should buy gold or providing some other useful (and often profitable, at least to the advisor) advice.
