We have fast-forwarded to 2022. For decades, Americans enjoyed lifestyles based on spending and debt, fed by a federal government that pretended the day of reckoning would never come. That day is here.

People still fill the streets, but few of them have gainful employment or the prospect of landing any job.

Those lucky enough to still draw a paycheck work for survival, not prosperity. Inflation is rampant. The once-strong American dollar is at an all-time low. A loaf of bread costs a pocketful of dollar bills, if you can find someone still selling bread. Energy costs alone can bankrupt people and businesses. Banks aren't lending, and why would they? Who can afford to repay a loan? Businesses have long stopped innovating, as well as hiring. What's the point, when so few Americans can afford their wares?

For decades, a growing chorus of Americans warned that these would be the consequences of an exploding national debt, an admonition Washington repeatedly ignored. Politicians in both parties, of course, knew it was easier to make promises, spend money and let another Congress deal with the consequences. But the "next" Congress never did. Here in 2022, the U.S. owes as much to the nations holding its debt as it produces. Interest payments on that debt crowd out all annual domestic spending, beyond defense, Medicare and Social Security.

In other words, there is no money left for anything else. The biggest and most painful of those debt checks is written to China, long America's biggest creditor.

Looking back, it was easy to imagine such fiscal insanity as something that was supposed to happen only in Argentina, Mexico or Greece. Certainly not in the United States, the great economic power of the last century and "the richest nation on earth." The American Dream, that enduring cross-generational belief that hard work and an honest living would lead to a better life, passed along to sons and daughters, is long dead. Years of willful blindness to impending fiscal calamity that should have become obvious in 2008-09 leaves only an American Nightmare ahead.

Too late, Americans more clearly understand the nation's debt problem in personal terms. When debt grows faster than income — when a nation or a single family banks its future on spending money it doesn't have — collapse is inevitable. This is where we are in 2022, and even in these dire days, absent from the psyche of Washington lawmakers is the restraint needed to make the necessary sacrifices.

The choices back then were difficult, and President Barack Obama's debt commission had some promise. Our hope was that they would put everything on the table, including such politically contentious but necessary steps as reducing military and domestic spending, increasing certain taxes and, importantly, repairing the entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare that would swallow up the budget.

Instead, Washington gave us this future.

Open your eyes. It's 2010 again. It's not 2022, not yet, but it will be soon enough.