The United States Going Bankrupt... or Is it Bankrupt Already
From The Times of London, which you should read in conjunction with the next post on Mr. Bush's "pay for themselves" (ha!) tax cuts:
The United States is heading for bankruptcy, according to an extraordinary paper published by one of the key members of the country's central bank.Thank you, Mr. Bush! Imagine that. In less than eight years, President Clinton took us from a terrible deficit into a record surplus. Before Mr. Bush's first year in office following Clinton, he had already driven us back into the red.. and now, into bankruptcy.
A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and welfare timebomb could send the economic superpower into insolvency, according to research by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve.
Prof Kotlikoff said that, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt. "To paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, is the United States at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bare, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, or wrecked in consequence of failure to pay its creditors," he asked.
According to his central analysis, "the US government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds''.
|