If you have been following the news from Nicaragua you no doubt noticed that the supermarkets were looted a few days ago amid protests against the Sandinista-run government.

That represents real progress compared to the last time the Sandinistas were in power.

Back then, the supermarkets didn't have anything worth looting - except for rum.

I recall visiting the site of a former supermercado in 1987 looking for food, only to find that the shelves were empty except for some crudely made wooden toys and a few shelves of rum.

If you bought the local rum, you didn't get the bottle. They poured the rum into a plastic bag and kept the bottle to refill.

For twice the price you could get Havana Club - and keep the bottle. Big spender that I am, I dug out 16,000 cordobas and splurged.

That may sound like a lot. But it was just two dollars in American money. The Nicaraguan currency was so debased at the time that you needed a backpack just to tote around enough money to get through the day.

I bring this up not to have a laugh at the expense of our Latin neighbors but to impart the political insight I gleaned from that experience: What happens there can happen here.

I learned that in short order last month when I went to Puerto Rico to write about the problems with the island's electricity grid that were exposed by Hurricane Maria last September.

No sooner did I return home than I learned New Jersey's grid had the same problem I'd seen on the island: Trees were permitted to grow in the right-of-way for power lines. A few storms that didn't have half the force of Maria had cut the power to tens of thousands of homes.

Puerto Rico also suffers from an unfunded pension liability that is huge - but not as huge as New Jersey's.

And then there's the issue that sparked the protests in Nicaragua: Social security. President Daniel Ortega recently announced that the government would be cutting benefits and hiking contributions to keep the system afloat.

Ortega dropped that plan after the protests broke out, but this represents a wonderful irony that should not go unremarked.

Ortega first came to power in 1979 as a Sandinista rebel determined to establish a socialist economy. Now the former Marxist is pushing reform in that country's social security program.

Meanwhile here in America no leading politician of either party would dare suggest reforming our Social Security system. The Democrats in Congress recently accused the Republican majority of plotting such reforms. The Republicans recoiled in horror.

But the Republicans were guilty of Sandinista-style bookkeeping themselves when they enacted a tax reform that cuts revenue $2 trillion with no counterbalancing cut in expenditures.

Something's got to give if we want to avoid the sort of turmoil seen in Nicaragua, where those protests turned deadly after police opened fire and killed about 30 people. (Another reason the Nicaraguans are upset is that Ortega is spending $80 million to buy Russian tanks.)

I got a good whiff of how grim our future could be when I put in a call to Laurence Kotlikoff, an economics professor from Boston University who coined the term "intergenerational accounting."

"We're bankrupting our kids with this big credit card bill," Kotlikoff said. "The fiscal gap is growing by about five trillion dollars a year."

The "fiscal gap" is the difference between "the present value of all projected future expenditures ... less the present value of all projected future tax and other receipts," according to the website for the Inform Act.

That's a bill before Congress endorsed by 17 Nobel laureates in economics. It would require Congress to do an analysis of the long-term fiscal effects of any bill.

Of course, we could just keep printing money to cover all those costs. Just for the fun of it, I asked Kotlikoff how much money we'd need to print.

He did some quick calculations and concluded that to close the fiscal gap the feds would have to print out 60 times as many dollars as the total amount of dollars now in circulation.

"Of course you can't increase the money supply 60 times," he added.

Unfortunately, you can - and Venezuela is doing it. The bolivar, that country's currency, is worth one ten-thousandth what it was worth in 2012. The unfortunate souls living there are enduring the sort of bread lines the Nicaraguans endured in the 1980s.

But there's nothing uniquely Latin about that, Kotlikoff pointed out. Right next door to Nicaragua is Costa Rica, which has a stable government and a strong economy.

"This is all about bad government," he said. "It's not any product of history or politics or culture. It's just crappy government."

It is indeed.

And at the moment we are experiencing it on a bipartisan basis.

PLUS - WHIP INFLATION NOW: A reader brought up the 1971 decision by President Nixon to take the U.S. entirely off the gold standard. This was of course a way to avoid raising taxes to pay for the disastrous Vietnam War started by the same guy who started the disastrous War on Poverty, Lyndon Johnson.

The predictable inflation followed almost immediately and before long Nixon's successor, President Gerald Ford, began the ill-advised "Whip Inflation Now" campaign - complete with silly campaign buttons.

That blunder helped Ford lose the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter, who had to deal with hyper-inflation during his four-year term.

I like to run the numbers through an inflation calculator like this one, to show how much value the dollar has lost in a given time period. It turns out that a dollar in 1971 is worth $6.15 in today's currency.

This brings up a question the Beltway crowd has been avoiding: How long before we re-center our currency, as often happens in banana republics. At the moment, a dollar is worth what a dime was worth when I was born.

Or to put it another way, a dime is worth what a penny was worth back in 1950. Pennies are useless these days and just create unneeded complications at the cash register.

Why not make the current dime the penny and the $10 bill the dollar?

Don't laugh. It's going to happen one day.

BELOW: If you're going to live in a banana republic you might as well get the advantage of the warm weather (interestingly this song was written by the late Steve Goodman, probably the most talented songwriter in recent history.)