For goodness sake, we need to be able to pay our bills!

Here's the chart that says it all.  All of the cliches about how we needed to save the economy from collapse forget that the primary threat to our economy is epic, drunken profligacy, both in spending and in promises of future benefits.  There's just no getting around it:  we're bankrupt and the system is going to collapse.  And the answer isn't, indeed cannot be to double down.