The debt bomb is ticking. The U.S. Treasury says our national debt will hit twenty-eight trillion dollars by 2018. This means that every single day you keep your savings in paper-backed investments, the Federal Reserve destroys your money, your stocks, your savings account, your 401K. But just as the debt has more than tripled in the last decade, so have gold and gas. Gold and gas track debt more than any other assets on earth. So if the debt is doubling to $28 trillion by 2018, where do you think your money needs to be? Gold has been the greatest hedge against currency collapse the world has ever known, and gold has been the world’s wealth preserver of choice for over 5000 years.

From the authors of the national bestseller 13 Bankers, a chilling account of America’s unprecedented debt crisis: how it came to pass, why it threatens to topple the nation as a superpower, and what needs to be done about it.
 
With bracing clarity, White House Burning explains why the national debt matters to your everyday life. Simon Johnson and James Kwak describe how the government has been able to pay off its debt in the past, even after the massive deficits incurred as a result of World War II, and analyze why this is near-impossible today. They closely examine, among other factors, macroeconomic shifts of the 1970s, Reaganism and the rise of conservatism, and demographic changes that led to the growth of major—and extremely popular—social insurance programs. What is unquestionably clear is how recent financial turmoil exacerbated the debt crisis while creating a political climate in which it is even more difficult to solve.

America is unjustly worried about ”national debt,” believing it can no longer do the many things that mark it as a great nation. Discussions of national undertakings–including infrastructure repair, jobs programs, military modernization, and disease prevention–have all been stifled through fear of insolvency. America has convinced itself that it can no longer afford, as a nation, to do many of the productive things that it has done so well over its history.

That’s a great shame, because America remains a nation of tremendous resources in every sense, and the underlying assumptions about U.S. government financial instruments are not correct. America can never face the debt problems of nations like Greece, thanks to its fundamentally different financial system.

This short book explains why such fears should not hold back America, and why even the expression ”national debt” is neither meaningful nor appropriate for the United States.

Sarah Palin talks to CNN’s Jake Tapper about comparing the national debt to slavery, saying the term “fits the bill.”