Total Debt

Here is an interesting chart of U.S. total debt, including household, corporate, and local governments, in billions.
From: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/Current/z1r-2.pdf

1977 2826.6
1978 3211.2
1979 3603.0
1980 3953.5
1981 4361.7
1982 4783.4
1983 5359.2
1984 6146.2
1985 7123.1
1986 7966.3
1987 8670.1
1988 9450.7
1989 10152.1
1990 10834.9
1991 11301.4
1992 11816.5
1993 12391.4
1994 12973.6
1995 13667.5
1996 14399.8
1997 15210.8
1998 16216.4
1999 17291.3
2000 18165.4
2001 19297.5
2002 20716.1
2003 22443.8
2004 24445.0
2005 26770.8
2006 29181.1
2007 31700.8
2008 33605.9
2009 34641.0
2010 36068.2
2011-Q2 36516.8

My thoughts:
The total debt has never gone down. It does within a sector, such as household debt, but the total always increases. Our financial system seems to depend on ever greater amounts of debt to infinity.

Right now, the household sector is delevering. The total household debt as of 11Q2 is 13298. The last time it was lower than this was in 7Q1 when the total was 13179.

In order to keep the total expanding while a major portion of it is declining requires that the federal government step in to prop up the total. It seems that the government is the guarantor, not of all the debt, but of any decreases in other sectors. The trend is that the debt moves off private balance sheets to the public balance sheet.

The question remains, how long until the U.S. public balance sheet is so bloated that it pops? Can this continue indefinitely?