The U.S. is almost $10 trillion dollars in debt. We’re planning on borrowing another $700 billion to shore up the banking system, and it may not even do the job. Foreign creditors are hesitating to loan us more money because they doubt the future value of the dollar or have their own financial problems to deal with. We’ve carried a national debt as long as I’ve lived and there’s no hope on the horizon for getting rid of it.

Can we declare bankruptcy and start over?

Maybe the country can skip the country for a few weeks. We’ll leave our junk out for the repo man, like our analog TVs and 1st-generation IPods, and hide the good stuff in our cousin’s attic. “Oh, no! You’re taking our New Kids on the Block LPs and our CRT monitors?” 

When our creditors stop calling us, we’ll sneak back in the country and live frugally for a while. No one would lend us money again, so we would have to be really good with our finances in the future. No more unfunded tax cuts or war sprees! I’m looking at you, President Bush.

Credit cards will be banned and replaced with a piggy bank in every pot. If we want to buy something, we’ll save up for it, just like our grandparents did. The combinations will be set by people with more sense than us (our children) so we won’t be able to withdraw money early when the IPhone 5G comes out (”Now with more Gs!”) or when low gas prices inspires Detroit to figure out a solution for their problems: the new Santayana SUV! “Those who forget the past are…uh…check it out! This SUV runs on gas and the parts of smaller cars that you crush!”

A new ethic of saving will cause some parts of the economy to take a hit. Dark days are ahead for the dog throne industry. We’ll have to scrape by with regular couches for our pets for a while. And to be frank, I don’t see much hope for the pet porthole sector either.

But if we can send a man to the moon, who says we can’t tighten our belts and live frugally for a few decades, or at least until we figure out how to send our debt to the moon?

I understand though if you find this measure too drastic. There are smaller steps we can take to save money. Canada, fair warning: if 300 million Americans show up at your restaurants tomorrow, be very suspicious if we all have to go to the bathroom at the same time.