The dangers are clear as day to Felicia Brown in Saginaw, Mich. To her, it's the leaders who ignore them, she says.

"We're stealing from our children's future and our grandchildren's future," says the cashier and mother of three, who also responded to the AP/Ipsos poll. "We're led off on this belief that we should buy, buy, buy. Everyone needs a big house, everyone needs a new car every two years. We're spending all this money on that, and we're not saving anything."

The trade imbalance

Some people, however — including economists — think the picture isn't so gloomy.

Ben Bernanke, who recently left the Federal Reserve Board to serve as President Bush's top economic adviser, has argued that the problem is not with the United States. The trouble lies overseas, where people want to save rather than spend their money. The key is to encourage other countries to spend and invest more, he says, though he also believes that the federal budget needs to be balanced.

By raising the issue of foreign investment, Bernanke touches on another area that scares economists — America's inexhaustible desire for foreign goods.

The trade deficit — the difference between what America imports and what it exports — is the highest it's ever been, both in absolute numbers and in comparison to the size of the economy.

As a society, Americans are on track this year to spend $680 billion more on foreign goods such as Chinese-made clothes, Japanese-made cars and Scandinavian cell phones than overseas buyers do on American goods. The crush of arriving, Asian-made products recently spurred the Port of Los Angeles to switch to 24-hour operations.

Nearly two decades ago, the country fretted over a trade imbalance equal to 3.1 percent of the overall economy, or the gross domestic product. It's more than twice as big now, roughly 6.5 percent.

Here's how economists, from former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to analysts at the International Monetary Fund, explain the danger: Americans, who go into debt to keep living a life beyond their means, are spending more and more of that borrowed money to buy goods from overseas.

At the same time, the government provides more services to the public than it can afford to — and goes into debt to cover the cost.

Foreign banking

Other nations actually purchase that debt, in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds and notes. Those bonds have increasingly been snapped up not just by private investors but by foreign banks. Japanese investors hold the most U.S. debt, but China has been buying more than any other country in recent months.