The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : The Big Picture

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Just in time for the debt ceiling negotiations, Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf has written a blog post that nicely breaks down the nature of the debt overhang. It includes this graph:

And these options:

Given the aging of the population and the rising cost of health care, attaining a sustainable budget for the federal government will require the United States to deviate from the policies of the past 40 years in at least one of the following ways:

Raise federal revenues significantly above their average share of GDP;

Make considerable changes to the sorts of federal benefits we provide for older Americans;

Substantially reduce the role of the rest of the federal government-that is, defense (the largest single piece), Food Stamps, unemployment compensation, other income security programs, veterans' benefits, federal civilian and military retirement benefits, transportation, health research, education and training, and other programs-in our economy and society.

Option number two is the way to go.

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Oldefarte| 7.19.11 @ 3:31PM

I vote for option #3 [partially], since governmental welfare is/will destroy this country if not substantially eliminated. SS, Medicare , veterans' benefits etc have been payed for or are deserved from service; whereas things like Medicaid, food stamps, foreign aid, housing aid, etc are not. What's needed are: decreasing governmental welfare payments through limiting to the strictly needy, forcing a conversion from welfare to workfare among healthy governmental assistance recipients, revamping our public educational system to insure adequate knowledge by graduates insuring their ability to financially support themselves!!!!!!