A permanent trade deficit that requires more and more debt to be printed and sold for the future generations supposedly to pay back (will never happen, the default and inflation will take care of that) is due to a population consuming more than it produces, full stop, period.
When I say a population consumes more than it produces what I mean is this: you can have all of your government offices, government departments, government subsidies, government programs, everything that government does, you can put more than half of your population on various programs, food stamps, welfare, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, whatever. All of those things combined require *more* money than you can generation as an economy. People never vote for someone to reduce spending, spending always grows, government officials get excellent retirement packages, health care paid by the system, etc. This entire thing consumes much more than it is capable of producing.
Sure, you can actually tax everyone much more and maybe you can have a smaller deficit, but actually realize that the demand is so much greater than the supply that probably taxing everybody at 80% won't be enough. Actually *nothing* is *ever* enough.
You can promise everything to everyone, you can even attempt to deliver it. Free food, free housing, free education, free healthcare, free energy, free clothing, free travel, free transportation, free entertainment, free everything. If you do that, there is nobody working, everyone is just getting everything for free, so who is working? Who is producing all of these things, delivering all of these services? That's the imbalance, that's the maximum imbalance taking to 11. But you don't have to take it to 11 to have an impossible imbalance.