WorldNet Daily (Link) - Jerome R. Corsi (January 18, 2010)
A blue-ribbon panel that includes three former heads of the Congressional Budget Office is telling President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress that the federal deficit must be cut now or the national debt within about two generations will be 600 percent of the gross domestic product.
�The debt level of the United States is unsustainable, something has to give,� said Rudolph Penner, former head of the CBO and co-chairman of a report issued last week by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration.
The report concludes federal deficit spending is so out of control that unless Obama and Democrat leaders on the Hill make changes now, debt in 2080 will be six times what the nation produces.
The alarm is being sounded just as the Obama administration is preparing to push his nationalized health care plan through Congress. It comes from a bipartisan group of top economic policy experts, including three former heads of the CBO, who warned existing entitlement programs including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security already are creating a fiscal crisis for the nation without the addition of government-funded universal health care.
�The fundamental problem is that we have these three very large programs � Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security � that � are growing faster than tax revenues and faster than the economy,� Penner told WND.
The result is �an unsustainable federal budget deficit� that Penner described as �ever onward and upward.�
With the recession and the huge stimulus package added to the beginning of the baby boomers retiring, United States debt is already at 50 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP, and is projected to grow to 80 percent of GDP by 2019, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates of the Obama administration budget plans as they currently stand.
Studying the growth in three major entitlement programs � Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security � the report, �Choosing the Nation�s Fiscal Future,� said spending was far outpacing tax revenue such that �any efforts to rein in future deficits must entail either large increases in taxes to support these programs or major restraints on their growth � or some combination of the two.�
Unless action is taken immediately, the study warned, the U.S. �faces the risk of a disruptive fiscal crisis.�
In an alarming chart, the study projected that federal debt would be more than seven times the nation�s GDP in 75 years if no action is taken to constrain or offset the growth of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and if tax rates stay near their current level.
The report predicted a frightening fiscal future for the U.S. should the Obama administration and Congress fail to act.
�If remedial action is postponed for even a few years, a large and increasing federal debt will inevitably limit the nation�s future wealth by reducing the growth of capital stock and of the economy,� the panel advised. �It will also increase the nation�s liabilities to investors abroad, who currently hold about one-half of the federal government�s debt.�
Increasing debt to GDP levels also causes problems with increased interest payments for U.S. taxpayers in the future who will be obligated to pay ever-rising costs just to finance current budget deficits.
�Increasing debt also may contribute to a loss of international and domestic investor confidence in the nation�s economy, which would, in turn, lead to even higher interest rates, lower domestic investment, and a falling dollar.�
The panel suggested four different solutions, varying the mix of entitlement program spending and tax increases in the policy alternatives:
All four budget alternatives were constructed with a view to keeping U.S. debt on what the panel considered a sustainable ratio of 60 percent U.S. debt to GDP.
The problem with implementing any of the budget alternatives is that the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress have demonstrated a propensity to increase entitlement programs dramatically, without producing a politically acceptable means of increasing taxes to pay for the programs.
Consistently, the Obama administration has resorted to a form of class warfare, threatening to �tax the rich� to pay for expanded social welfare programs, including the Democrat health plan.
Programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are entitlement programs by nature and have automatic expansion built into them, especially as the baby-boomers retire, Penner noted, in contrast to government-funded health programs in Britain and Canada that operate on fixed budgets and ration health care.
�To restrain these programs, they have to be very significantly restructured. Health programs are especially difficult because they are impacted both by the aging of the population and the inexorable rise in per capita health costs,� Penner said.
Penner was also concerned that the political resolve to increase taxes was much less firm than the urge to increase entitlement programs to a level beyond the ability of the federal government to finance the programs with ever-increasing levels of debt spending.
Penner also admitted the tax revenue assumptions of the report were optimistic.
�Our revenue assumptions are extremely optimistic as they stand,� he agreed. �We use the CBO baseline, which has us going on current policy and has the deficit ever-increasing. CBO assumes, quite unrealistically, that foreigners are going to provide all the savings we need at a constant interest rate. That�s how CBO keeps the economy growing in the face of extraordinarily large deficits.�
Higher interest rates needed to attract U.S. savings into Treasury debt financing could deprive the private economy of the capital needed to generate economic growth.
Penner is a fellow at the Urban Institute. He was the director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1983 to 1987. From 1977 to 1983, he was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Glenn Beck: The Fundamental Transformation of America January 6, 2010 Video at link- I�m going to give you a hard concept to get your arms around: It�s the concept that there are people in this country who want to intentionally collapse our economic system.
How could it be that any American would or would want to do such a thing? Well, those involved sleep just fine at night because they tell themselves that they�re not collapsing, they�re transforming � transforming � America into something better.
The progressive movement in which these people are involved started around the turn of last century. These are the same people who gave us the Federal Reserve. They brought America the concept of redistribution of wealth through the progressive income tax, telling Americans at first that only the rich would be affected. They are the same people who felt that they knew better about your health than you did that they needed to force you to stop drinking alcohol-through Prohibition. They brought us the League of Nations, then the United Nations. And their biggest contribution of all: They brought the understanding that our Constitution was a flawed, living, breathing document and that our Founding Fathers were a group of rich racists.
Now, today�s group of progressives do not speak the same language as you and I do: Economic justice is taking from haves and giving to the have-nots; social justice, to quote Mark Lloyd, is when someone needs to step down so someone else can have turn, and transforming America means collapsing the state as we know it and rebooting it as a progressive utopia.
None of the language is the same. What I would call socialist, they call social justice. That�s critical to understand; they really believe they�re making things better and they�re about to finish the process.
They learned from their earlier failed attempts to transform America and the world, like the League of Nations.
First, there can�t be a debate. They simply declare the debate over and that they have consensus already.
Second, they can�t conduct their transformation in the open.
And third, they can never let a good crisis go to waste.
Now, as we discuss this, keep in mind that you�re watching all of this through your eyes; you see this as trying to collapse our economy. But progressives see this as a fundamental transformation � something better than we�ve ever had � as promised by Barack Obama.
So, let me introduce you to the people you would say are fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system: Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven, authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy. Something else to remember is that this isn�t some conspiracy theory that we�re tossing out; they wrote about collapsing the economy and how they planned to do it in the article they co-authored in the �60s called, �Mobilizing the Poor: How it Could Be Done.� Six months later, it was published in The Nation, under the title �The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.�
Simply put: Cloward and Piven were radical Columbia professors in the 1960s who believed in �change� and �social justice.� Inspired by the riots in Los Angeles in 1965, they wrote and published their article which outlined the best way to bring the kind of Saul Alinsky-type social change to America. In their estimation, it was to overwhelm the system and bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with impossible demands and bring on economic collapse.
Cloward and Piven instructed activists that if a crisis did not exist, promote or manufacture one by exaggerating some unthreatening predicament. (Global warming anyone? And to an extent, health care?)
Their methods worked ... for a while. From 1965 through 1974, due to the strategy and efforts of Cloward and Piven and their followers, the total recipients on welfare rocketed from 4.3 million to 10.8 million. In 1975, there were nearly 1 million welfare recipients in New York City alone. That year, New York City declared bankruptcy. The whole state nearly went down with them. more...