“This debt is like a cancer,” warned co-chairman of the U.S. president’s debt and deficit commission, Erskine Bowles, at the National Governors Association annual meeting in Boston, on July 11. “It is truly going to destroy the country from within,” he said.

The other co-chairman, Alan Simpson, pointed out that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone absorb all federal discretionary revenue. “The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans—the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries,” said Simpson.

Bowles was White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, and Simpson is a former Republican senator from Wyoming.

“We can’t grow our way out of this. We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem,” said Bowles. “We can’t tax our way out. … The reality is we’ve got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that.”

America’s debt is expected to surpass $14 trillion next year—around $47,000 per American. Bowles warned that if America continued on its current path, just the interest on the debt payments would be around $2 trillion by 2020.

“Just think about that: All that money, going somewhere else, to create jobs and opportunity somewhere else,” he said.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is an 18-member team tasked with reducing the annual deficit to 3 percent of the American economy by 2015. Its job isn’t to eliminate, or even reduce, the debt. It’s simply to make sure it grows by less. And even that is a hard job.

Simpson said the commission is full of “good people of deep, deep difference, knowing the possibility of the odds of success are rather harrowing to say the least.”

America’s economy is built on a foundation of debt. That foundation is simply not stable. Until the economy is anchored upon something else, it is doomed to fail. For information on how to fix America’s economy, see our article “A Suggestion for Correcting the Economy.”