So much for holding back as he did in July. So much for the new Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, being more frugal than the last secretary, or the one before that, or the one before that. The so-called “richest country in the world” is back to borrowing an average of more than two billion a day.

Last month, the national debt went up $70.7 billion. That’s two billion, thirty-two million a day, weekends included. If you take the weekends out, it’s three billion, seventy-four million every day Mr. Paulson showed up for work during August.

So far this fiscal year, the nation’s debt has gone up $582 billion. September being the last month of the fiscal year, the annual increase will easily top $600 billion. The twenty to twenty-five billion in debt markers that are simply dumped into the Federal Employees Retirement account every September guarantees that record.

It will be a new all-time high that we can add to the George W. Bush crusade for an Empire built on a pile of debt. Here’s the record so far:

With this year’s increase, we will be very close to $3 trillion in additional debt added by a single administration. And with two more years to go, Bush will undoubtedly make it to $4 trillion, more than doubling the debt we had at the end of his father’s reign.

No president, other than George W. Bush has run up such an enormous amount of debt. No matter how you look at it, as a percentage of GDP or whatever, this fiscal irresponsibility is untenable and unsustainable.

All it takes is for any one of our major creditors such as China or Japan to “call in” their holdings and our bankruptcy will be obvious overnight.

If you think that the democrats are going to get us out of this mess, forget it. The democrats are, after all, not known as the “tax and spend” party for nothing. And they’ve endorsed Bush’s aggressive New World Order and “big business” disciples down the line. Don’t forget, it was Clinton who told us about “bridges” into the Twenty-First Century.

With more than sixty lobbyists for every member of Congress, investment bubbles bursting one after another, industries leaving the country in droves, the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, a ridiculous negative balance of trade, a less than nothing savings rate in the population, a dollar falling in value, more lawyers than the rest of the world combined, more people employed in government across the country than those left in manufacturing, pension and health care withdrawals and cutbacks, wide open ports and borders, a predicted civil war going on in Iraq, an annual half-trillion military budget supporting invasions, occupations, and more than 725 military playgrounds in other countries, we are already making the “fall of the Roman Empire” look like a “soft landing.”

Meanwhile, we can’t even rebuild one of our own medium size cities where inadequate federal levees caused its demise.

All in all, the task and responsibility for getting us out of this mess fall directly on the shoulders of every taxpayer in the nation. And, as James Howard Kunstler puts it, the people are sleepwalking into their future.

If you think the wealthier taxpayers are going to take on the responsibility, then you haven’t noticed their escape hatches to exit the country, investments in real estate on the Riviera and Dubai’s manmade islands in the Persian Gulf, or their use of real trust funds to safeguard their future.

Like the airlines, railroads, and horse-drawn buggy builders, the entire nation is already bankrupt and, unlike our former enemies, there’s no one in our government working on recovery.

If there's a moral in this saga, it's this. Don't give credit cards to children.