Anyway, like I was saying...
Here's a bellwether for anyone who has the willingness to see.
The question is will we be able to overcome the inertia that has lead us to this place before we endure "market corrections."
It's funny how important this issue is and yet how little impression it makes. Perhaps it's not 'sexy' enough to be newsworthy until the crisis is upon us.
"...Stuart Butler, head of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and Isabel Sawhill, director of the left-leaning Brookings Institution's economic studies program, sat down with Comptroller General David M. Walker...
[Unanimously], they agreed that without some combination of big tax increases and major cuts ... the country will fall victim to the huge debt and soaring interest rates that collapsed Argentina's economy...
"The only thing the United States is able to do a little after 2040 is pay interest on massive and growing federal debt," Walker [Comptroller General] said. "The model blows up in the mid-2040s. What does that mean? Argentina."
"All true," Sawhill [Brookings], a budget official in the Clinton administration, concurred.
"To do nothing," Butler [Heritage] added, "would lead to deficits of the scale we've never seen in this country or any major in industrialized country. We've seen them in Argentina. That's a chilling thought, but it would mean that."
[Walker:] ...U.S. debt and obligations ... $45 trillion in current dollars -- almost ... the total net worth of all Americans ... $150,000 per person. Balancing the budget in 2040... could require cutting ... federal spending as much as 60 percent or raising taxes to 2 1/2 times today's levels.
... Heritage and Brookings ... don't agree on an exact solution ... but they seem to accept ... "you can't do it with either spending or taxes. ... going to need a mix of the two."
... both parties still deny the problem. "I don't think we're there yet," Walker said. "The American people have to understand where we are and where we're headed."
"No republic in the history of the world lasted more than 300 years," Walker said. "Eventually, the crunch comes."