We Can Tame the Debt Without Breaking Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/we-can-tame-the-debt-without-killing-entitlements-20120607
Interestingly, as the article points out, everyone wants to focus on the disastrous upper bound where the debt reaches multiples of GDP in a couple of decades, but to me the real interesting element is that it is _possible_ (note, I didn’t say _probable_) for us to maintain our social safety net _AND_ slowly pay down the debt. Of course, that means we need tax ‘increases’ (since when did the expiration of a _temporary_ tax cut translate to a tax _increase_? Man we live in a fucked up country!) and some sort of control over defense spending (something you would think would be trivially accepted since we have ended one war, are ending another and are switching to vastly cheaper drones to randomly kill innocent people). Today, politically, that appears to be totally out of the realm of possibility, but it is nice to know that our leap off the fiscal cliff isn’t preordained, just the result of brain dead idiocy on the part of our corrupt, criminal political ‘leaders’.
As a btw, here is a link to the CBO summary: http://cbo.gov/publication/43288.
