I'm really not looking forward to the day we have to cut all of the programs because we don't ahve any credit left and then negotiate or print our way out of our debts. Who thinks this is going to end well?
"The factory closed in town 5 years ago and the sheriff is evicting everyone out of their houses because their savings ran out and the foreclosures are approved but today is a good day because dad bought ice cream on his credit card!"
I think this comment belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the global financial market.
We live on a closed planet. Every human being ever born has shared in the same global economy, which produces goods and services and (independently) produces numerical currency we use to assign artificial labels to the value of those goods and services. Only those goods and services have actual value. The money isn't real, it's just scorekeeping.
The score keeps going up, deliberately, because that's how you incentivize people to continue producing goods and services. We're not borrowing from space aliens to fund our global economy, we're just making up new fake numbers used to assign fake values to the things that actually matter, like how many skyscrapers and MRI machines and cups of coffee we have today.
Programs (or skyscrapers or MRIs or coffees) don't get cut because we've raised the fake score too high, they get cut when we stop using the rising score to incentivize people to do the work required to support them. The real danger of global economic collapse has nothing to do with credit, and everything to do with people's perceptions about their incentives to do that work. Credit (of all sorts, including debts and savings bonds and mortgage contracts and even checking accounts) is just the mechanism we use to help people raise their score.
So in that context, yes "extend and pretend" is exactly what we do. It's the very basis of capitalism, the system which has produced this incredibly skyrocketing increases in human standard of living over the past 200 years. This is a good thing. This works. Let's roll with it.
Whenever I see someone say "the economy is about to crash because the economy is like a business and a business can't operate like this" I'm 100% certain that person did not take a single macroeconomics class in college. Maybe spend 30 minutes with a Macro101 textbook and have your mind blown, then come back and tell us what you think. It's not like thousands of the smartest people to ever live haven't devoted their lives to figuring this shit out, yet somehow every outraged internet forum participant thinks he/she knows better.
Who thinks this is going to end well?
I do.
Yea, me too.