I'll give you that one on Wikipedia, though I don't trust it - especially for global warming or 9/11 !
)
You may well be right Bear - I'll assume you know about it much better than me.
What I'd add is that whilst the "national debt" of countries is getting worse and worse as you say, I don't think it means there are a lot of people making staggering amounts of money outside of the national "budget".
Most of the real wealth had been taken out of the dollar(do you recall Greenspan slagging off the dollar ?) and put into euro's and safer investments.
Not sure about the UK but basically my take is the privately owned Fed is destroying the US and it's dollar by design, and have already bailed before the crash.
I suspect the same may be true of the UK too.
Whether the balance of trade deficit is bad or not, I think the US may well attack Iran, but as Ron Paul states the trade deficit simply can't afford it.
Who knows how much the private bankers really make ?
The U.S economy could be chicken feed by comparison.