Well, this is happy news (although, of course, we already knew it)

Stephen Green: Yep, We’re Doomed.

Happy Monday morning, everybody. We just hit another milestone on the road to ruin.

It seems like only August [Editor's note: it was only August, Steve.] that I brought you the happy news that the interest payment on our debt was about to hit ONE TRILLION DOLLARS and that it had already eclipsed defense spending. Here we are, just four months later almost exactly to the day, and the vig is up more than 10% to $1.1 trillion.

I'll type the full number for effect: $1,100,000,000,000.

Defense spending — including aid to Ukraine and Israel — is a smaller fraction of our nation's wealth than it has been since World War II, except for a couple of years right before 9/11 when we mistakenly believed we'd never have to fight a major war again. So don't you isolationists out there blame foreign aid (barely more than one percent of spending) or nasty "forever wars" for our pending fiscal doom. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq didn't help, to be sure, but I have met the enemy and he is us, baby — you and me and our fellow 335 million Americans with our endless appetite for federal spending.

Federal revenues for the year are a little over $4.4 trillion, which doesn't even come close to covering Uncle Sugar's $6.3 trillion "budget." Those are huge numbers, so let me give you a little perspective.

Imagine you earn the average U.S. monthly income of $4,665. Now imagine that a quarter of your income — about $1,166 — goes to your Visa card. 

Pretty stupid of you, right?

But it gets worse.

You didn't put any major appliances or make any kind of life-enhancing improvements while running up roughly $200,000 in credit card debt. You spent it all on Cheetos and Scratcher tickets, none of which paid off more than a few bucks. Any small windfalls you blew on more Cheetos.

How you did that, you have no idea. But Washington's version of high-calorie/low-nutrition Cheetos consists of stimulus checks, welfare benefits of every imaginable kind, student loans, etc — pretty much everything but the very few things that the Constitution authorizes Washington to do. D.C.'s Scratchers is spending on green energy boondoggles that will never pay off and on wars they have no intention of winning.

But hang on; we aren't done with the stupid.

Read the whole thing.