Interest Costs Will Exceed Medicare Costs

This article pretty much confirms the questions we have been asking....how do you pay the interest on $15,000,000,000,000 of national debt?... when that number is growing by over $1,000,000,000,000 per year?

When a debtor’s borrowing costs start to exceed what he spends on necessities such as food and medical care, it might give him pause.

Likewise, to understand the federal government’s growing debt problem, consider these two items from President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), presented Monday in the president’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposal:

Last year, taxpayers spent more than twice as much on the Medicare program as they did on interest payments on federal debt.

But starting in 2018, the federal government will pay more in interest costs than it will spend on Medicare, the health insurance program for the disabled and people age 65 and older. (The OMB excludes from its calculation the premiums that Medicare beneficiaries pay; it includes only what taxpayers pay for the program, which covers 80 percent if its costs.)

Analysts have long cited Medicare as the prime example of the relentless federal spending growth. For 30 years, Medicare has been growing faster than America’s national income.

See it here; http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/16/6066883-interest-costs-on-the-debt-will-exceed-medicare-spending-in-2018

Did you catch that first sentence...."it might give him pause".....of course with Obama's $3.5 trillion budget just being released with shows tacking $1.5 trillion more onto the debt...we can plainly see that there is no pause in sight.

So let me ask my readers....how do you think this is all going to play out? What will happen when the world can clearly see that we will soon not be paying our stated obligations? Could we be insulated from crushing pain because we will still be considered the "least worst" place to invest...seeing that Europe and Japan are also in crushing financial hurt? Or could we soon be in for a world of pain that only those who lived through The Depression could possibly understand?