If the federal deficit doesn’t concern you, if your eyes glaze over when Congress talks Medicare reimbursement rates, you may find yourself waking up one day with another harsh reality: China will own you and your daddy and all the pretty little things you can’t ever have.

A new report by the nonpartisan Concord Coalition should give every U.S. citizen pause. Some day in the future, China, or India for that matter, might dictate if we get a home loan or not.

The premise is rather simple: Our savings rate is now flat or negative, but other countries have invested in our corporations and our public debt. They are in effect financing our country, because we didn’t save enough to do it ourselves.

U.S. debt held by foreigners totaled $2.5 trillion in March of this year. That’s about half of the publicly held U.S. debt.

We borrow $711 billion more from the rest of the world than we lend to it. It’s known as the current accounts deficit and most experts agree, say Concord Coalition authors Neil Howe and Richard Jackson, that it isn’t going away anytime soon.

Congress is gridlocked, they say, on entitlement reform. In other words, we can’t figure out how to live within our means, and our laws automatically increase spending on important programs like Medicare and Social Security.

There doesn’t appear to be an inclination for cutting spending or raising taxes in either political party, yet that is precisely what experts and other say taxpayers must do. The stakes are high.

In one case, the deteriorating financial situation with the U.S. government, the authors argue, will put our foreign debtors, India and China, in the driver’s seat as they acquire more U.S. assets. The authors argue that just as the United States could put political pressure on Third World countries it used to lend to, China and India will have mounting pressure to put on us.

There’s already been an example or two of this influence showing itself. Investments from Asia and the Middle East, the authors say, fueled a “U.S. residential property boom that culminated with a financial crisis in which Abu Dhabi, Singapore, and China have had to come to the rescue of Citibank, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley.”

High finance is not the only thing at stake in these deals with the devil of debt. As more capital flows out than into America, more foreign goods flow in, making an impact on U.S. jobs. The authors argue as the influence of foreign ownership of debt grows, U.S. “residents may wake up to find themselves ‘sharecropping’ on an economy owned by outsiders.”

Unfortunately, the availability of foreign sugar daddies to finance our overconsumption doesn’t create a sense of urgency about our situation. It could go on for a long time without much notice — even though some have argued the declining value of the dollar driven by our fiscal policies indeed has driven up the cost of gas.

Some argue that these developing economies like India and China will grow fast and have lots of money to lend, making a kind of global banker-borrower partnership. But at some point — any point really — when these developing nations need money of their own for their own aging populations, they won’t have a “ mortgage” agreement to fulfill.

All they need to do is sell their investment, and there is at least some risk they will indeed need to do that someday sooner than later.

There is still hope if we act soon. We’re all in this together. Taxpayers need to make sure they are responsible in saving for their own retirement and not overconsuming. And taxpayers should demand Congress do something. Congress, for its part, needs to get serious in its role as stewards of the national budget. Congress needs to make sure that our fiscal foundation is not a house of cards.