[LuxLiving]

On accruing debt:

"Our riches are our curse in our attempts to attain a trade balance. If we were less well-off, commercial realities would constrain our trade deficit. Because we are rich, however, we can continue to trade earning properties for consumable trinkets. We are much like a wealthy farm family that annually sells acreage so that it can sustain a lifestyle unwarranted by its current output. Until the plantation is gone, it's all pleasure and no pain. In the end, however, the family will have traded the life of an owner for the life of a tenant famer."

~Warren Buffett, "Ex-Omahan Traded Law for Board Room", Robert Dorr, Omaha World Herald, August 3, 1977, p.B1.

True for the individual as well as the government!