With Jill Stein belatedly and inexplicitly fronting for the Clintons in a recount of Rust Belt states' votes to delegitimize Donald Trump's election, the nation's pressing financial problems will continue to be marginalized.

The financial world approaches a state of anaphylactic shock with every nuanced pronouncement from Fed Chairman Janet Yellen about a possible minuscule change in interest rates that will have a minimal effect on the U.S. economy. Prior to The Donald's entrance onto the scene, the political elite waxed eloquently with extreme concern over a tepid GDP. However, Congress, the administration and Wall Street studiously ignore the impending fiscal apocalypse.

The only economic indicators that are of significance are the Current Account Balance (CAB) — the combination net trade and foreign investment income — which has been running near a negative-$500 billion per year over the last decade, and a federal deficit in 2016 of $600 billion. No matter his methods, President-elect Trump has correctly identified foreign trade deficits and the national debit as the most pressing issues facing us. We have a narrow window to fix these problems before our enemies force extremely unpleasant solutions onto us.

Connecting today's total debt of $19 trillion to unfunded liabilities for government pensions — Social Security and Medicare — shows an actual debt estimated to be about $65 trillion. Economist Herb Stein famously quipped: “If something cannot go on forever, it will end.” The question is not when the deficit spending will stop but how violently it will end.

History has examples to consider. The Roman and British empires first rose and then were destroyed as a result of changes in their trade and monetary situations. The German Weimar Republic was destroyed after World War I by a massive government infusion of fiat cash leading to hyperinflation; chaos and violence. The end of the Roman Empire ushered in the Dark Ages. The simultaneous dissolution of the British Empire and the Weimar Republic in the 1930s produced the Nazi Party and World War II.

Our underlying problems are quite visible: Most Asian and Mexican manufacturing labor is under $5 per hour compared with U.S. labor of over $20 per hour, U.S. companies avoid foreign income repatriation because of draconian U.S. tax policies, and a massive influx of low-skilled, mainly Hispanic migrants has induced inner-city economic distress.

We have outsourced manufacturing, information technology and service jobs under the guise of free trade in exchange for low-cost imports of goods and services from nations practicing mercantilism — maximizing exports to and minimizing imports from the U.S.

The oft-mentioned U.S. middle class that every politician is going to help is in decline and continues to disappear as a vibrant middle class has been developed in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and now China. While we export $500 billion per year of national wealth, all of these nations combined have a positive CAB of over $600 billion per year. Export-driven Germany is Europe's dominant country with a positive CAB of $300 billion per year.

It doesn't take the proverbial rocket scientist to determine that the loss of large numbers of high-paying middle-class jobs has adversely affected tax revenue. Our trade policies have outsourced manufacturing jobs and left behind the unemployed surviving on government subsidies. The Fed has been creating fiat money to cover the budget shortfall with reduced tax revenues from now unemployed middle class citizens.

Mr. Trump has included rational alternatives in his proposed agenda. Reducing U.S. business taxes and ending additional taxation on repatriated foreign tax paid income will immediately end inversion and make a significant reduction in the CAB deficit as U.S. companies find it profitable to repatriate income and invest and hire in the U.S.

However, his traditional punitive tariff approach to our unequal trade policies will replay the Smoot-Hawley Act of the 1930s with another trade war and worldwide recession. His infrastructure proposals in an era of massive uncontrolled deficit spending will lead to hyperinflation and ultimately Weimar II.

Infrastructure improvements must wait — we are bankrupt, surviving on the naive belief that the U.S. fiat dollar will remain the world's reserve currency forever. China recognized our inability to manage our finances in 2008 and is on an accelerated path to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency with the yuan. This will crush the U.S.

Either we eliminate our foreign exchange and internal debt problems or suffer the fate of the Romans and British and repeat the Germans' lurch toward fascism in the 1930s.

Charles Campbell, a resident of Woodstock, is a retired senior vice president of Gulf Oil Corp. His e-mail is lochawe@verizon.net.