I've been hearing these stats all my adult life. While they sound worrisome, they don't seem to have slowed us down much. The truth is that there is a lot of debt out there and the Federal Budget deficit will get steadily worse as the Boomers retire. At some point, the piper will have to be paid. It's possible we've just been postponing the day of reckoning and they, when it arrives, it will arrive with a vengence.
Yes, but Pat thinks (and asserts in the article) that trade deficits create debt. That's ridiculous. They do no such thing. He's doing nothing more than appealing to the economic ignorance of his followers. And that's just the beginning. He carps about our personal savings rate but has no understanding of how it's calculated and why that makes our rate of savings look low. He cries about household debt but refuses to recognize that household net worth is at an all time high. Pat's a doomer who works far too hard to find bad news, thereby losing all credibility.
They thought exactly the same just before the Great Depression.