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As bad as the $6 trillion national debt figure truly was back in 2001, the "conservative" administration of George W. Bush has managed to preside over debt increases that have boosted U.S. indebtedness to over $9 trillion. This enormous amount of red ink results in a weaker dollar and is a major cause of the lagging U.S. economy.

The dollar's value is steadily falling, now lower than the Canadian dollar. Measured against the Euro and the British pound, the dollar is weaker almost daily. Mr. Bernanke should have addressed this feature of America's slowdown. But he didn't.

For years, federal officials have made a habit of downplaying the accumulating debt by pointing to lower-than-predicted annual deficits. But the federal deficit and the accumulated national debt are two different animals. The deficit appears to be less than it really is because the administration continues to funnel receipts for Social Security, Medicare, and other so-called trust funds into the general revenue stream. These funds, as any realist knows, were collected for promises that must be kept. If Social Security has an IOU from the administration, it's still debt, and it still calls for interest payments. Those interest payments are already huge.

Also, a whopping 22 percent of the trillions owed by the U.S. government happens to be held by foreign lenders, mainly the Japanese and Chinese governments. Both are in a position to pull the plug and send the dollar into a virtual free fall.

Warnings from China this week that it might actually begin moving away from the dollar sent financial markets reeling. "The world's currency structure has changed," Chinese central banker Xu Jian said in Beijing according to the Washington Times. The dollar is "losing its status as the world currency," he said. His comments were echoed at the same meeting by Cheng Siwei, vice chairman of the communist nation's National's People's Congress who warned: "We will favor stronger currencies over weaker ones, and will readjust accordingly."

Much of the recent debt increase has come as a result of the costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But another huge chunk of the dollar's decline results from inflation, the thieving process of creating more of them. When lenders (China, Japan, even private citizens in the U.S. and elsewhere) begin to realize that they will eventually get paid off with dollars that are far less valuable than the ones they loaned, recession could easily morph into depression.

There are ways to stop the nation from committing fiscal suicide. They all amount to stopping the spending. Stop it for wars that were begun for reasons found to be false. Stop it for vote-buying socialistic schemes that always ruin a nation. Finally, stop it by returning the nation to some semblance of limited government under the Constitution as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

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