I am sympathetic that they are facing difficult times, we all are, but there is no money left, period
Possibly a naive question, but as a geographry / met rather than economics type, I'd love to know just where all this money has gone. You can't uncreate money, once it's in the system, it's in the system. Surely what changes is who has it - is the financial system not a zero-sum game?
So assuming it is a zero sum game and we have lost all our money, where is it now? There must be someone sitting on a tidy sum somewhere. And if we have lost it all on the back of a excessive debt burden, then does that not implicate those financial institutions that packaged the money and sold it on as an asset / lent it out as now benefiting in the form of our sky high deficit and debt repayments? And are these financial institutions not the ones we bailed out in the first place?
Or am I being thick and at the state / national level money, debt etc is actually more conceptual and ethereal rather than the cold hard cash I hand over every time I go to the pub?