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What's really amusing to me is when gold-nuts rail against modern currencies as fiat currencies. It seems to me gold is just as arbitrarily denoted a currency as any other, it just has no explicit guarantor.

EDIT: Also, why is it so hard to imagine taking care of the debt? Or is it because he has little faith in taxpayers' willingness to pay into it?

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The difference between gold and fiat currencies is that gold cannot be devalued through inflation. We don't have a machine that can manufacture gold, but central banks can 'manufacture' as much new fiat currency as they like.

I imagine that's why Scott's friends are buying gold. Not because they think the end of the world is nigh, but because they think the dollar is going to have to be devalued to sidestep the crushing debts that have been run up.

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