Sunday, September 14, 2008

No escaping the black hole of entitlement spending

Armed and Dangerous: "Timing the entitlements crash" (HT: Maggie)

At some point, the U.S. government is going to lose both the ability to increase revenues and the ability to sell bonds. At that point the entitlements system will crash. Transfer checks will either stop issuing or become meaningless because the government has, like some banana republic, hyperinflated the currency in order to get out from under its debt obligations.
I've wasted a billion electrons on this topic, but let's try again: the United States cannot possibly pay for all the obligations it has made to Social Security and Medicare. But since nobody in Washington has the will to state the obvious, we're going to continue borrowing from foreign sources until the whole system grinds to a halt. (Right around the time I want to retire - super!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this... Are you sure you're not Dan Flynn? ;-)


(Then again, I don't know why Dan would blog here, when he has the Flynn Files... Your entry [not to mention your sidebar] made me think of those posts. :-)

Anonymous said...

At some point, the U.S. government is going to lose both the ability to increase revenues and the ability to sell bonds.

S&P says that on current policy US Treasury bonds are "junk" by 2027.

But on the up side, France goes off the cliff first.