Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Easy Come, Easy Go

Or should we call this post "It's Only (Our Children's) Money"
In fact, the government’s classification of obligations such as interest payments as official and others, such as Social Security payments, as unofficial is a labeling game with no basis whatsoever in economic theory. It’s a strategy politicians have used for decades to disguise the true nature of our country’s indebtedness.
How big is the fiscal gap? By my own calculations using the CBO data, it now stands at $211 trillion -- a huge sum equaling 14 times the country’s economic output. To arrive at that figure, I assumed that annual noninterest spending, as well as taxes, would grow indefinitely by 2 percent a year beyond 2075, the point at which the CBO’s estimates end.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-29/stop-the-fiscal-war-against-our-children-now-laurence-kotlikoff.html

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