The National Debt and the Great Unravelling

The national debt is nearly at 8 trillion dollars. For an interesting set of charts describing who owns our debt, how much, and perhaps most importantly under which administrations the debt grew and by how much see http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/faq.html Particularly interesting is the fact that when Jimmy Carter left office the national debt was well under 1 trillion dollars where it had been since the beginning. By the time the Reagan Bush era was over the debt had soared to just under 4 trillion dollars. Clinton added almost 2 trillion to the debt, bringing it just under 6 trillion though, to be fair, the debt had ceased to grow significantly in the last few years of his presidency. Bush II has grown the debt to just under 8 trillion dollars and this has happened in a little over 4 years of office. The greatest debt growth occured under the leadership of the republicans--republicans who pride themselves on fiscal conservatism. That fiscal conservatism is, of course, a lie and a dangerous lie at that. Because of this astronomical debt, much of which is owned by the Chinese with whom we will increasingly be in conflict over oil resources, we are in an extremely vulnerable position. Our currency may become devalued. Couple this with peak oil and you get the makings for a catastrophe--another great depression. For analysis of the fiscal irresponsibility of the extreme economic right wingers and its consequences towards producing another depression see economist Paul Krugman's lecture (in real video) from wgbh:
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=1641