Debt is a problem whether you can service it or not. If I go out and buy a $900,000 McMansion with 6 bedrooms, 5 baths, and a 1200 sq foot sunken living room, the mortgage will be a major problem for me for the next 30 years whether I can service that mortgage payment or not. But at least I could pay that debt OFF before I die (hopefully.) Our Federal debt will still be here long after we all go the way of the Dodo.Owlman wrote:As any good corporation would tell you, debt is only a problem if you can't service your debt (there are businesspeople that take on debt to offset some other income for example). Right now, our debt is not a problem. Countries are actually buying our debt as a matter of choice right now. We don't have a short-term debt problem, we have a long-term debt problem, with projections being extreme. The biggest culprits in terms of size, medicare, medicaid, social security and military expenditures. Medicaid is actually one of the most efficient health care programs out there. Social Security under Reagan increased taxes to pay for this time period (of the baby boomers). While that money was used for other things, social security is still safe for about 30 years.
The biggest problems are the military and medicare. The military spent money on two wars and didn't even include their costs in the budget. That's a huge backlog of money. Our military budget drawfs every other country in the world. Medicare is only solvent for about 12 years. It's a 300,000 gift transfer to seniors. But of the programs mentioned, which is the one most likely to get attacked? The one with the least influential voters, medicaid (even though it's the most efficient of all the ones mentioned). Despite rhetoric, generally, the poor don't vote and don't have a big lobbiest.
They need long term solutions, not short term that actually makes it worse. Watch. When companies start cutting their research budget, those are companies on the downslide. When things tight, you increase your research budget, not decrease it.
The two biggest problems for our federal debt are not the military and medicare. The two biggest problems are that married people are having fewer children and we are all living longer (can't afford to pay retirees at age 62.) You can't grow your way out of debt with an ever aging population that has lost the will to marry and reproduce itself.