Yes, that's TRILLION, with a "T":
While the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated last month that this year's budget deficit would drop to 3% of GDP from almost 10% in 2009, the future outlook is bleak, says economist Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University.
The CBO's bad news: "without action, the deficit will grow 'notably larger' starting in about four years, a result of our aging population, rising health costs and the new subsidies for health insurance," he writes in the New York Times.
And based on the CBO's projection of what will happen without major policy changes, Kotlikoff calculates that the "fiscal gap," a measurement of government debt, totaled $210 trillion last year.
That put the true budget deficit at $5 trillion, compared with the official total of $680 billion, he argues. [emphasis added]
Please take a moment to breath into the paper bags you've all been issued until your pulse rate falls back under quadruple digits......better now? Very well.
Can anything be done about this? Without a violent revolution and yet remaining within any practical, much less constitutional, boundaries?:
"The fiscal gap — the difference between our government's projected financial obligations and the present value of all projected future tax and other receipts — is, effectively, our nation's credit card bill," Kotlikoff writes.
"Eliminating it, would require an immediate, permanent 59% increase in federal tax revenue. An immediate, permanent 38% cut in federal spending would also suffice."
Nope.
I'm reminded of something UC-Berkeley astronomy professor and "celebrity scientist" Alex Filippenko once said on an episode of The Universe (paraphrased): "Numbers like millions, billions, and trillions are difficult for most people to grasp, because most people have never had millions, billions, or trillions of anything." There's also the old saying, "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." Figures of that magnitude are abstractions; there's no way to make them "real" to the average layman. So you have to explain it in terms of the actual, real-world, on-the-ground impact: economic collapse, societal breakdown, higgledy-piggledy chaos. But since no American below the age of ninety has ever lived through and experienced such calamities firsthand, such warnings are no more 'real" to them than the incomprehensibly huge dollar figures driving them.
And that, gentles, is why nothing is ever done about the debt. It's been high on the issues list for over thirty years, and yet the factors driving it ever skyward - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and now ObamaCare - have stubbornly remained political "third rails," guaranteeing that nothing will ever be done about them until they drive the nation into inevitable, inexorable fiscal and economic collapse. And when that happens, the public's reaction will be just like it is in the movies: Crying out for somebody to "do something," as long as they benefit from it and they don't have to pay for it. Anything other than that will bring out the hissing torches and pitchforks.
It was over twenty years ago, as I recall, that I flatly stated on the old CompuServe Information Service political debate forums that I and anybody younger than me would and will never see a dime from any federal entitlement program because the country will be bankrupted long before we reach the eligibility age. I was in my twenties at the time. Now here it is, a generation later, and the only thing that is not completely as I foresaw is that, thanks to Barack Obama, we're about a decade closer to the Collapse than we'd otherwise have been.
210 trillion dollars, folks. That's fifteen years of U.S. economic output at the current rate, assuming nothing else but paying off that "national credit card". Which means no eating, no heating, no driving, no flying, no clothing, no entertaining, no living. Absolute and utter, universal slavery for a decade and a half. The Ultimate Austerity. Which would, in practical terms, mean an immediate economic collapse and violent revolution. Allow a subsistence level of "living," and maybe it becomes thirty years of slavery, with merely an overwhelming likelihood of violent revolution in the very near-term. And you do know, of course, who are "massah" would be.
Alternatively, Janet "Old" Yellen could just print and inject into circulation the 210 tril. Which would ignite a hyperinflationary conflagration like adding an oxygen atmosphere and a lit match to Titan, which was so helpful for the survival of pre-Nazi German democracy, and from which there'd be nobody to rescue us. And then the collapse, the violent revolution, etc.
It's beginning to appear as though the collapse and violent revolution would be easier than everything leading up to it. Better to get them out of the way now, when the overthrow-ee is richly deserving of deposition. Better, IOW, to be poor and free than poor and enslaved, right?
Besides, it's not as though he isn't headed in that direction himself. The cost for which $210 trillion would be but the downpayment.
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