... perhaps you will believe Mr. Stockman, former Reagan Budget Director.
While the Fed fiddles, Congress burns. Self-titled fiscal hawks like Paul D. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, are terrified of telling the truth: that the 10-year deficit is actually $15 trillion to $20 trillion, far larger than the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of $7 trillion. Its latest forecast, which imagines 16.4 million new jobs in the next decade, compared with only 2.5 million in the last 10 years, is only one of the more extreme examples of Washington’s delusions.
Yep. And yet the solution to this problem in the intermediate and longer term is not all that complicated -- garrote the medical industry.
This is not difficult to figure out from the facts on where the money is going. It is also not difficult to figure out what's going to happen if we don't cut that crap out. Virtually the entire problem is found in just two programs, one of which is Social Security and the other is Medical entitlements.
Social Security's biggest problem is in fact disability, which is massively overstuffed and must be fixed. The actual pension plan is reasonably close to actuarial soundness and by indexing the full retirement age to longevity it would be ok. In about 20-30 years its expenses will begin to decline naturally.
If we do not resolve this problem within the next couple of years we are finished as a nation.
These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.
Yep.
And we do not have much time either, because the laws of arithmetic set forth exactly what is going to happen if we do not act, and the longer we wait the worse the damage will be.
Not "boom" as in "economic boom", but this sort of "boom"
http://media.chicagobooth.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=f15d95d054e8442ab0cc1c60321383101d
It'll take you an hour or so to listen to the entire talk, but it's worth it. This is one of the obvious and impossible-to-avoid triggering mechanisms for a serious international fiscal crisis.
