The national debt is currently 13.7 trillion dollars (you can round up to 14 if you ignore that piddling little GDP of Denmark). The American people could work together, movie-montage style, collecting every single physical dollar and cent in existence and they'd still have to go to Vegas*, hit the roulette tables, lay it all on black and win. Four times in a row. That's how you know you're doomed - most people crushed by debt imagine cleaning up at the casino OR having all the money in the world. When you need both, you're buggered.

Congressman Ron Paul has continued to run his Congressional office in a frugal manner, and was able to return more than $100,000 from his allotted office budget to the Treasury this year, an increase over the $90,000 returned last year.

Note: This article was written by Nicholas von Hoffman for The Nation. This man has a lot of courage: he points out that inflation hurts the poor the most. The rich can purchase hedges against inflation; the poor have no such protection. Even if inflation reduces unemployment, if salaries are worthless the poor are no better off. It is the worst-off of society that suffer from bad economic policy, as usual. He also implies that the Fed was counting on a looming crisis to take care of inflation for them. If this is true, then the Fed may really be as evil as many say it is.