Warnings, evidently that are falling on deaf ears. The towering and cancerously growing debt problem has been building for years, and while there is still a number of strategies to reduce or avert the effects of this outsized and completely imprudent course, none are being seriously considered at the moment.
Austerity, REAL austerity, is the means by which every nation that survived has managed to bring debt under control. The other major option is dissolution of the very structure of the nation altogether, defaulting on all debts.
By AD 400, nobody was seriously concerned with Rome’s total debt picture. By then, there were effectively two separate empires, the Eastern Empire and the Western Empire, though there was a fiction that it was still “one Empire”.
The Western portion, with Rome as its capital, was effectively incapacitated by AD 285, after the various Gothic tribes had sacked the city several times, and effectively foreclosed the mortgage they held on the former Empire. There were several attempts to recreate the Empire, but they were without wide popular support, and each soon failed.
Taxes to the new muslim overlords were much, much, less than the taxes to the Emperor.
It took me a while to realize that. Till then I couldn't see how the muslims who were small in number could hold all that territory if the population resisted. Quite simply, the people didn't resist till it was to late.