Stolen from a friend:
"That train scene at the end of Back to the Future 3 feels like a good visual analogy of the US dollar / national debt.
The train is the dollar. They hijack the train and get rid of the original operators, and then inject 3 logs into the furnace. The logs are like quantitative easing. Log 1 was 2008, log 2 was 2020, and we’re talking about putting log 3 in there where it starts going above the red line.
There was a point of no return, which the debt train has already passed, so it’s impossible to stop the train now before it flies off the default cliff. Now everything is riding on transitioning into another system before the end of the track is reached."