Cooking the Govt Books

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/08/detroit-today-washington-tomorrow.html

The fiscal gap tells us whether current policy is sustainable, what's needed to make current policy sustainable, and the tradeoff between adjusting policy now or later.

Given the $222 trillion fiscal gap, which is measured based on the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) long-term fiscal projections, current policy is clearly not sustainable. Making it sustainable requires either an immediate and permanent 64 percent increase in all federal taxes or an immediate and permanent 38 percent cut in all spending or some combination of tax increases and spending cuts.

Failure to make one of these adjustments or a combination of them leaves an even larger fiscal gap for our children and future generations to cover. Thus, fiscal gap accounting is an integral part of generational accounting -- knowing which generations will pay for what the government spends.

I worry for my kids.  

At some point govt math will fail. Perhaps Boards can tell us what happens... the only solution I can imagine is growth.

HUGE unfettered sustained growth. But instead I see wasted govt "investment" and expanded social obligations.

If throwing money/debt at it is a good idea... I'd like to see comparable examples. I haven't even gotten to the fed.

War , a terrorist distraction or martial law will happen. Insane governments don't know any other way. Then we will revolt tear down the facade we see and put up a new facade and things will get better for a generation and then right back down because the rot goes much deeper than mere government.

Don't forget it was Dubya and the "spend-happy" Reps that got us into this mess by setting up the biggest hoax in the history of the planet,blaming it on Iraq and taking us to a middle Eastern war that we are still borrowing money from China to fund. And Obama has kept it going when he said he would stop it. I believe than everything we hear from our government is about them all getting reelected.

Here's a depressing piece suggesting policy doesn't really matter that much.

I don't agree with every point presented, but it's an interesting take ...

Picture this, arranged along a time line.

For all of measurable human history up until the year 1750, nothing happened that mattered. This isn’t to say history was stagnant, or that life was only grim and blank, but the well-being of average people did not perceptibly improve…. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the state of technology and the luxury and quality of life afforded the average individual were little better than they had been two millennia earlier, in ancient Rome.

Then two things happened that did matter, and they were so grand that they dwarfed everything that had come before and encompassed most everything that has come since: the first industrial revolution, beginning in 1750 or so in the north of England, and the second industrial revolution, beginning around 1870 and created mostly in this country. That the second industrial revolution happened just as the first had begun to dissipate was an incredible stroke of good luck. It meant that during the whole modern era from 1750 onward—which contains, not coincidentally, the full life span of the United States—human well-being accelerated at a rate that could barely have been contemplated before. Instead of permanent stagnation, growth became so rapid and so seemingly automatic that by the fifties and sixties the average American would roughly double his or her parents’ standard of living. In the space of a single generation, for most everybody, life was getting twice as good.

At some point in the late sixties or early seventies, this great acceleration began to taper off. The shift was modest at first, and it was concealed in the hectic up-and-down of yearly data. But if you examine the growth data since the early seventies, and if you are mathematically astute enough to fit a curve to it, you can see a clear trend: The rate at which life is improving here, on the frontier of human well-being, has slowed….

There are many ways in which you can interpret this economic model, but the most lasting—the reason, perhaps, for the public notoriety it has brought its author—has little to do with economics at all. It is the suggestion that we have not understood how lucky we have been. The whole of American cultural memory, the period since World War II, has taken place within the greatest expansion of opportunity in the history of human civilization. Perhaps it isn’t that our success is a product of the way we structured our society. The shape of our society may be far more conditional, a consequence of our success. Embedded in Gordon’s data is an inquiry into entitlement: How much do we owe, culturally and politically, to this singular experience of economic growth, and what will happen if it goes away?…

It's a long but interesting read.

Here's the rest ...

http://nymag.com/news/features/economic-growth-2013-7/

Well, that article lets Obama, Bush and everyone off the hook.

yes... authoritarianism is inevitable.