BANGOR – In Bangor, we have the well-known Kenduskeag Stream Canoe Race each spring.

It’s great sport.

There’s a much larger, although metaphorical, canoe race taking place in our world today.

Our canoe is sponsored by the local business America Inc.

The first canoe to pass us carried the sign of a Greek company, and the next two we saw passing us were from Italy and Spain. The river is the Niagara.

Hear that roar around the bend? Whatever happened to that Greek canoe?

And look at those ambulances along the riverbank.

This is where the Western world is today.

It’s time to pull hard for shore and try to head upstream before it’s too late. It’ll be a workout.

Perhaps you’ve heard: The debt this country is piling up is almost beyond the comprehension of all but congresspeople and the wizards at the Federal Reserve.

As many have been saying, paying it off may not be left to our children and grandchildren. The real price is coming sooner, much sooner.

Let’s look at some of the important figures, as an accountant might, of the business America Inc.

Just lop off eight zeros from each sum, as I’ve been advised, and perhaps we could get a more comprehensible picture of the finances of this small (in this example) hypothetical business that has entered its canoe in the Great Niagara Race.

All those zeros in the real, national figures should make you dizzy. 

Income $220,400

Expenses $370,100

Deficit $149,700

Total debt $1,500,000 (at least)

Debt service $4,540 

This company must borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends, unless there’s another answer to its plight (see below).

Even if income increased by half, there would still be a serious deficit and growing debt.

This company is in trouble, big trouble.

In the real world, it would have gone bankrupt, busted, out of business, long ago.

But the U.S. government must not close its shop forever.

Maybe it can go to the bank for another loan?

If the bankers are sober they will show us the door, but if only slightly crazy, they could up the interest rate substantially to something like the Italians are now paying on their bonds.

Since our bankers have so much invested in this finest, biggest house in town they might take the risk — but don’t count on it.

Aha! But unlike our small company, Mr. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has a printing press in his basement, and it’s legal.

He knows that inflation is the great friend of debtors, and he’s been hard at work these days (TARP, Stimulus I, QE2, the “twist” and probably more ingenious schemes to come).

Sure, we know that printing presses in the basement are old-fashioned.

He just hits a few keys on his computer and — presto! — there’s another hundred billion, or several, in our coffers. Our creditors do not like this.

Financial collapse, devastating hyper-inflation, massive unemployment and “civil unrest” happen to other countries, but certainly not to this one, you would gather from the pronouncements of many of our politicians.

It can’t happen here?

No serious student of history should ever propose that. There may be truth to the old saw “the bigger they come, the harder they fall.”

It is not very likely that there will be any international mega-bank (International Monetary Fund) to throw us a lifeline.

As citizens of the nation that pulled together to overcome Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and many threats in between, we can face up to today’s threat.

Let there be no crying over pulling the plug on the National Cowboy Poetry Festival, the Montana Sheep Institute, buying more land for Acadia National Park and so forth.

Even more importantly, we need to ask ourselves who should be, and when should they be, eligible for our social “safety net” programs, the real drivers of our huge fiscal burden.

This is not just a matter for those uncaring guys in the green eyeshades.

It’s our continuance as a recently prosperous country, or a precipitous decline into a nation of widespread poverty.

Budgets must be cut, and severely, to avoid much suffering and turmoil.

The economist Herbert Stein is famously quoted saying, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Think about that.

W. Alan Boone is a retired physician living in Bangor.