The biggest U.S. financial crisis isn't the housing crunch. It's the government debt bomb being planted by baby boomers to explode in the faces of their children and grandchildren ...
The country already owes $9 trillion, a record, and almost half of it to foreigners, also a record. [The U.S. government] pays more in interest [on the national debt] than the annual cost of the Iraq war.
By the middle of this century, 20 percent of the national income — not just a fifth of the budget but a fifth of the whole economy! — will have to be diverted to pay interest on the debt ... . Another 20 percent will be needed to finance health care and pensions for boomer geezers.
That'll leave virtually nothing for education, roads, basic research and other investments that make the country great.
Oh, wonderful! Not only do we have to worry about the threat of global warming and the need to wean ourselves off foreign oil, we have to stop spending so much money into the bargain. Or everything will go bust.
Only problem is, not only do liberals like to spend money, so do today's conservatives à la George W. Bush.
oldstyleliberal sees little evidence that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton can fix this. They are, after all, liberals.
Nor does one, such as oldstyleliberal, who hopes to seem wise, tend to feel that John McCain — he who is willing to keep troops in Iraq for the next 99 years, and hang the cost — has a handle on the impending meltdown of the federal budget.
All of the presidential hopefuls will, like oldstyleliberal, be long gone by mid-century. (Well, maybe the youngish Obama will be still here, in his geezer-hood.) In fact, the next president, should he or she serve two terms, will be leaving office in 2017, just about the time that, the experts say, we will have begun to spend over 20 cents of every dollar of U.S. gross domestic product on health care alone.
That figure is due to go up to 25 cents on the GDP dollar by 2030. When the Hancock column talks about "20 percent ... to finance health care and pensions for boomer geezers" by mid-century, he means 20 percent of the federal budget, and it doesn't include private expenditures on health care/health insurance.
All of this, of course, pales in insignificance compared to whether Sen. Obama ought to wear a flag lapel pin or Sen. Clinton is fighting too dirty a campaign.
We hear more about how Sen. McCain is supposedly too soft on illegal immigrants than about how, with Sen. Lieberman, he has co-sponsored a bill that would put a down payment on quashing global warming.
McCain-Lieberman would set up a cap-and-trade system for reining in companies that spew too much carbon into the sky and rewarding companies whose carbon footprint is moderate and shrinking. But that's not a topic that commands our attention as voters; lapel pins are.
If the next president doesn't get a grip on our looming problems, we will know who to blame.
As Pogo used to say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
