The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.
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Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today -- as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September -- issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.
Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.
So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.
To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
''We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are,'' Fraser says.
Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America -- Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.
A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.
And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
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Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program's long-term fiscal shortfall -- the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs -- over time.
By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.
Medicare so dominates the nation's fiscal future that some economists believe health care reform, rather than budget measures, is the best way to attack the problem.
''Obviously health care is a mess,'' says Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. ''No one's been willing to touch it, but that's what I see as front and center.''
Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.
Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps -- $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare -- and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.
Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders -- primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners -- have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.
Despite the propensity of Gen-Xers and the others who are girding their loins to blame baby-boomers for all of the upcoming financial mess, most of my baby-boom compatriots have been well aware of the coming crisis. In fact, most of us have worked under the assumption, fed by more than two decades of predominantly Republican rule, that neither Social Security nor Medicare will be there for us.
But it's not as if "no one could have anticipated" the coming burden on the national senior safety net. It's not as if we've exactly been quiet, as we make our way through this God-forsaken level of reality like an elephant passing through a snake. The Social Security surplus that was bandied about so much during the 2000 election no longer exists, having been looted to pay for other government expenditures. Believe me, we are well aware of this, and we are also well aware of the coming generational warfare as more Americans fight over an ever-diminishing pie.
George W. Bush came to office with a $400 billion surplus, and he has now spent us into oblivion by cutting taxes for his friends and embarking on a pointless war that has shoveled billions of our tax dollars that could have paid for education, investment in technology and infrastructure, health care, and shoring up our safety net programs. And we have nothing to show for it, other than an insurmountable debt, a war that we have no idea how to end, a health care system on the verge of collapse, a diminishing job base, and a bleak future for the very children this Administration professes to protect -- until they're born, anyway.
Perhaps the worst failure of Congressional Democrats over the last six years has been their failure to point out that it is Republicans who are the big debt spenders. In the post-WWII era, when Democrats control the White House increases in debt spendinig have been far less than under Republican presidents:
Since 1946 the Democratic Presidents increased the national debt an average of only 3.7% per year when they were in office. The Republican Presidents stay at an average increase of 9.3% per year. Over the last 59 years Republican Presidents have out borrowed Democratic Presidents by almost a three to one ratio. That is, for every dollar a Democratic President has raised the national debt in the past 59 years Republican Presidents have raised the debt by $2.87.
With the terrorism fear card not working for the Republicans this time, and the "Scary Oversexed Negroes" card not working, and the "Scary Oversexed Homosexuals who want to get married" not really working, it's only a matter of time before the "Democrats want to raise your taxes" card becomes the drumbeat in the days before the midterm election.
There was a Mark Alan Stamaty Washingtoon that appeared in the Village Voice during the 1988 campaign. Alas, it can't be found anywhere on the Web, but it depicts a hysterical George Bush Sr. jumping up and down and screaming "Killer negroes are coming to get you! Liberals want to take all your money! Read my lips! Read my lips!"
Like father, like son. We can't say we weren't warned. So you might want to ask your friends who voted for the son to start thinking about how they're going to tell their children why they let it happen.
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