Just in case you had forgotten the financial straits the country as a whole is in, here's a bit of info gleaned from the latest CBO (Congressional Budget Office) report by economists Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns (via Hotair):
$220 Trillion. With a big fat T.
Just Social Security alone will be enough to absolutely crush the economy. Once the Baby Boomers all retire, they'll be collecting a whopping 85% of the GDP annually.
Holy sweet cyborg pirate Jesus.
The solution recommended by the economists? Raise taxes by 65% or lower spending by 40% immediately, right effing now, or it'll only get worse.
Naturally, neither party wants to touch the issue of the Baby Boomer retirement, because they see it as political suicide. The unfortunate truth, though, is that we cannot sustain this kind of spending. This goes beyond the argument of Keynesian vs. non-Keynesian policies. There's no amount of benefit to be gained from deficit spending that could make up for the debt incurred.
The solution to this won't be pretty, but it'll only get worse the closer we get to the brick wall. Here's my idea: Raise the age that you receive social security to 83 immediately (5 years older than the average life expectancy), which will apply to anyone who is currently 60 or younger. If you're 50 or younger, you don't get Social Security. Ever. Sorry, buddy. Life sucks.
Don't go thinking your paychecks are getting any bigger, though. That money you pay into SS still gets paid, but instead of going towards the "Support retired Americans" fund it goes into the "Prevent America from becoming a third world country" fund.
That's only one of many steps that would be necessary until we got our debt back under control, but at least it'd be a start.
In the course of that year, the U.S. government’s fiscal gap -- the true measure of the nation’s indebtedness -- rose by $11 trillion.
The fiscal gap is the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue. It captures all government liabilities, whether they are official obligations to service Treasury bonds or unofficial commitments, such as paying for food stamps or buying drones.Wait! Before your head explodes when you see the $11 trillion number, read this to calm you down: That's only an increase of 5.2%. See, it's not really that bad!
The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using the Congressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast -- the Alternative Fiscal Scenario -- is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference -- this year’s true federal deficit -- is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.
This fantastic and dangerous growth in the fiscal gap is not new. In 2003 and 2004, the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale extended the CBO’s short-term forecast and measured fiscal gaps of $60 trillion and $86 trillion, respectively. In 2007, the first year the CBO produced the Alternative Fiscal Scenario, the gap, by our reckoning, stood at $175 trillion. By 2009, when the CBO began reporting the AFS annually, the gap was $184 trillion. In 2010, it was $202 trillion, followed by $211 trillion in 2011 and $222 trillion in 2012.
$220 Trillion. With a big fat T.
Just Social Security alone will be enough to absolutely crush the economy. Once the Baby Boomers all retire, they'll be collecting a whopping 85% of the GDP annually.
Holy sweet cyborg pirate Jesus.
The solution recommended by the economists? Raise taxes by 65% or lower spending by 40% immediately, right effing now, or it'll only get worse.
Naturally, neither party wants to touch the issue of the Baby Boomer retirement, because they see it as political suicide. The unfortunate truth, though, is that we cannot sustain this kind of spending. This goes beyond the argument of Keynesian vs. non-Keynesian policies. There's no amount of benefit to be gained from deficit spending that could make up for the debt incurred.
The solution to this won't be pretty, but it'll only get worse the closer we get to the brick wall. Here's my idea: Raise the age that you receive social security to 83 immediately (5 years older than the average life expectancy), which will apply to anyone who is currently 60 or younger. If you're 50 or younger, you don't get Social Security. Ever. Sorry, buddy. Life sucks.
Don't go thinking your paychecks are getting any bigger, though. That money you pay into SS still gets paid, but instead of going towards the "Support retired Americans" fund it goes into the "Prevent America from becoming a third world country" fund.
That's only one of many steps that would be necessary until we got our debt back under control, but at least it'd be a start.
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