Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Hello and welcome to this week's Dividend Cafe.

I am your host David Bonson and we are going to dive into one of our favorite subjects this week, one of the most depressing,

one of the most difficult, one of the most painful issues to talk about. And yet, I think,

one of the most important that is that of the national debt. Now, let me start off by saying,

I allude all the time to the fact the Dividing

Cafe, every Friday, a weekly commentary that I've been doing since September of 2008, where I am

trying to avoid as much as possible the temptation to go into what exactly happened that week

and do it as a weekly commentary focused on weekly

headlines. But a lot of times the weekly headlines are what we do need to cover because

of the significance of what has happened and the ability to use a weekly headline to try to reiterate

a longer term principle. So while we may, let's say, talk about the Iran war a couple

months ago, it wasn't so much a dividend cafe about the Iran war and what happened that Thursday

or is going to happen the next Tuesday, but using the current events to make a bigger point

for investors, more evergreen principles that apply to a longer-term

period of time and what we are to do as investors, how we're to think about certain economic,

news, geopolitical realities. When you talk about the national debt, it's generally a pretty long-term

subject that I want to be writing about all the

time that carries decades upon decades of relevance and ramifications and yet isn't always in

the headlines. It isn't always the story of the week. It's one of those things that's hard for

the media to cover because it doesn't have

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