How to delay the debt Armageddon (Jan. 24): No matter what your position on the tactical and practical options related to the federal debt ceiling, we all should agree the debt itself is a major threat to economic stability.
Both political parties should work to ward off that threat.
We conservatives favor a much more aggressive approach to debt restriction, and overall systemic reforms, than liberals, but in a national government with a partisan power divide, the measures we think ideal have no chance of being implemented in the next two years. What can and should be done, though, is to send the ratio of federal debt to the entire economy, meaning to GDP, on a glide path descending to more sustainable levels.
Right now, total debt-to-GDP stands above 120%, and the ratio of “debt held by the public” — in other words, not counting intra-government transfers — is approximately 100%….
The only way to stop disaster for Social Security and Medicare is…. (Jan. 25):
New Congressional Budget Office projections for Social Security and Medicare ought to convince President Joe Biden and Congress to create a new commission on entitlement reform.
Otherwise, disaster looms.
The CBO projects Medicare trust fund insolvency by 2030 and Social Security trust fund insolvency by 2033. And unfunded future liabilities for these programs comprise a huge portion of the $93 trillion in total unfunded liabilities facing the U.S. government by the turn of the next century. For comparison, that’s well over three times the size of the current U.S. economy.
As described by the respected and nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a private group, there is a plethora of options for warding off these crises, but all of them involve at least a small amount of shared responsibility. One hesitates to say “shared sacrifice” because most of the options require merely small adjustments in formulas and taxes that almost nobody would notice unless specifically looking for them. A combination of any five or six of these options could share the responsibility among various income groups in ways that both public and private budgets could handle with barely a hiccup…..
