> This isn't actually necessarily true. IF you continually live beyond your means (expenditures > revenue) then, assuming financing costs aren't continually dec

> This isn't actually necessarily true. IF you continually live beyond your means (expenditures > revenue) then, assuming financing costs aren't continually decreasing, you will have debt service costs that, on average, increase over time. This is actually totally true. It's neigh tautological. If you're always adding debt then everything else equal, debt service costs go up. If you're adding debt while interest rates drop, debt service costs might go down. But in the end interest rates (at least for the majority of human existence minus a few short periods) have been positive, and not only positive but higher than they are right now. Speculating that things will be OK because interest rates will stay low only makes sense if you're: 1. An idiot with no understanding of history and a complete lack of ability to do sensitivity analysis 2. Someone who has the ability to control the interest rate In my mind we've got a whole bunch of folks in camp 1 and 2 at the moment. Thanks to them we've got high REAL unemployment and non-trivial REAL inflation. Before you say "but unemployment is 5.6%!" I would encourage you to understand the way the unemployment metric is calculated and to ask if you think that's the proper way to do it. http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/181469/big-lie-unemployment.aspx http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/181469/big-lie-unempl... And before you suggest that the inflation numbers are legit, please do a thorough review of the methodology and explain to me how constantly changing the benchmarks doesn't constitute some kind of academic dishonesty if not outright fraud. Just because the government says something doesn't make it true. For example, they tried that with the Kennedy Half Dollar and no matter how many they made people kept buying them because although the official value was $0.50 the actual value in terms of metal was much higher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_half_dollar#Initial_popularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_half_dollar#Initial_pop...