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It seems most every industrialized nation that has exported many of its manufacturing plants and jobs to cheap labor nations ends up with a mushrooming debt problem.

Farming and industry create wealth. The value of the output is greater than the value of the input and labor. All other fields of endeavor just take a cut.

This is not always a bad thing. Transportation for example moves goods from where they are produced to where they are needed, taking a cut for the essential service provided. However many cut takers provide non essential services, simply keeping track of what the wealth producers are doing, but not actually helping the process along. At first these are necessary, the shipping clerk, the guy in the mail room, an accountant to make sure everyone gets paid.

However as time goes on the amount of this dead weight on the system increases to a point it can no longer be sustained. Either because of excess regulation, and the legions of bureaucrats it spawns, or the departure of industrial base. In our case we suffer from both. Because farming and especially industry create a lot a value you can support a lot of cut takers for every value producer. But at some point there isn't enough industry to support the cut takers. Then comes the debt to keep the system running and the bureaucrats employed.

But at some point there isn't enough industry to support the cut takers.

Per Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, the US government now spends almost a trillion per year on welfare type programs for working age Americans and their families. Of course, 40% of that is borrowed money.

Medicaid is the biggest of those programs.

Farming and industry create wealth. The value of the output is greater than the value of the input and labor. All other fields of endeavor just take a cut.

Yes, but they don't improve wealth by themselves. In the 1700's just about everyone was farming or making something. Science and technology increase efficiency so that each unit of input makes more units of output.

Those "cut takers" can actually enhance efficiency. I've created many analytical software systems that help a corporation plan huge expenditures of money. I take a small cut, but I've saved millions of dollars in waste. Keeping track of what a wealth producer is doing isn't non-essential; it's critical. Any company that doesn't do this will fail.