Congratulations to all the people who said we could get there if our politicians were just a little more irresponsible, foolish, short-sighted, careless, feckless, and every other way to describe our national march toward the cliff. We did it at even a faster pace than anticipated. Now, we can get to 80 trillion even faster. Forward, March over the Cliff into the Economic Collapse, Fellow Americans!

As you are reading this, the United States has already crossed a critical milestone: The United States national debt exceeds 40 trillion dollars. (To see the debt accumulate in real time, visit https://usdebtclock.org. There is a screen capture taken at 7 AM on September 1, 02026 at teh top of this article.)  I started writing this series in mid-August as I was writing a separate article on the future of the economy and how individuals can survive one of the most common causes of personal economic collapse: unemployment. As I was writing that article series, I quickly realized that the national debt surpassing 40 trillion dollars deserves its own article. To do otherwise would be to minimize a very important signpost on the road to our country's economic collapse.

The most common cause of national economic collapse is debt and overspending, and this will likely collapse our country. You can always have something exotic and exogenous destroy the country like a nuclear strike or an errant asteroid, but the debt collapse scenario is so likely to happen that it has reached the state of a foregone conclusion. As I was finishing up this first half of the article, we crossed the 40 trillion dollar milestone. It happened even faster than even I could anticipate.

Picnics and Potato Salad

You may wonder what picnics and potato salad have to do with the national debt and economic collapse thinking that you will receive a food recipe instead of what could be the perfect analogy for a potential future economic collapse of the United States.

Freshly made potato salad is not dangerous on its own and commercially prepared mayonnaise contrary to much popular belief is actually an inhibitor instead of catalyst of bacterial multiplication because of how it is manufactured. It is usually the time and temperature of the other ingredients which can cause problems. There is a critical danger zone with foods where if they are held between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours. (With commercial food storage preparations, the danger zone is between 41 and 135 degrees Fahrenheit) with special attention above 90 degrees where one hour is sufficient to have sufficient bacterial multiplication to cause food poisoning. The temperature of around 100 degrees is said to be a peak environment for a certain type of bacteria to have an ideal zone in which to multiply.

A good way to think about this analogy is the doubling effect. Owing someone a dollar is relatively easy to pay back, but if you owed a million dollars it would likely be much more difficult to pay back. If a dollar is doubled every day, by the eleventh day it reaches over a thousand dollars which is still an attainable sum for many people, but by the 21st day it reaches over a million dollars. A few stray bacteria are not usually dangerous to most non-immunocompromised individuals, but when doubled repeatedly with each doubling often taking minutes it becomes dangerous as large colonies of bacteria multiply that can easily overwhelm your immune system.