The Congressional Budget Office (CBO)…[recently] released new ten-year budget and economic projections – an update from its February baseline – again confirming that the national debt is on an unsustainable path. According to CBO’s new projections:

Debt held by the public will reach a new record by the end of Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 – 106.2 percent of GDP – and rise to 122.4 percent of GDP by the end of 2034.

The budget deficit will rise to $1.9 trillion (6.7 percent of GDP) in FY 2024 and $2.9 trillion (6.9 percent of GDP) by 2034, totaling $22.1 trillion over the 2025-2034 budget window.

Interest costs will reach a near-record 3.1 percent of GDP this year – exceeding defense and Medicare spending – set a new record next year and grow to 4.1 percent of GDP by FY 2034.

Under CBO’s latest baseline, federal debt held by the public will grow by $23 trillion through FY 2034, from over $27 trillion today to nearly $51 trillion by the end of 2034. As a share of the economy, debt will rise from 97.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at the end of 2023 to 106.2 percent by 2027 – surpassing the prior record set just after World War II – and 122.4 percent of GDP by 2034. Debt in 2034 will be $2.4 trillion and 6.4 percent of GDP higher than projected in February.

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📈 In its latest budget and economic projections released today, @USCBO again confirmed that the national debt is on an unsustainable path:

➤ Debt held by the public will reach a new record by the end of FY 2027, rising to 122.4% of GDP by the end of 2034.

➤ The budget… pic.twitter.com/22RnFOTbDh

— CRFB.org (@BudgetHawks) June 18, 2024

Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko. 

But by current American standards, the later Soviet leaders were not old men. Brezhnev was 75 when he died in 1982, but he had suffered his first major stroke seven years before. Andropov was only 68 when he succeeded Brezhnev, but he suffered total kidney failure just a few months after taking over. Chernenko was 72 when he came to power. He was already a hopeless invalid, suffering from emphysema, heart failure, bronchitis, pleurisy, and pneumonia.

It is a reflection of the quality of healthcare enjoyed by their American counterparts today that they are both older and healthier. Nevertheless, Joe Biden (81) and Donald Trump (78) are hardly men in the first flush of youth and vitality, as The Wall Street Journal recently made cringe-inducingly clear. The former cannot distinguish between his two Hispanic cabinet secretaries, Alejandro Mayorkas and Xavier Becerra. The latter muddles up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. If Kamala Harris has never watched The Death of Stalin, it’s not too late.

Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. Leon Aron’s brilliant book Roads to the Temple shows just how wretched life in the 1980s had become.

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"Are We the Soviets?" After four happy years at @opinion, it was time for a change. So here's my first column for @TheFP, with thanks to @bariweiss for recruiting me to her happy band. https://t.co/Zwxj3ChLLb pic.twitter.com/cyK0xHX7tQ

— Niall Ferguson (@nfergus) June 18, 2024

The Group of 7 countries might have set a record when they met in Italy last week. Has there ever been a less popular assemblage of leaders of the free world? Approval ratings ranged from Giorgia Meloni of Italy’s about 40 percent to Emmanuel Macron of France’s 21 percent to Fumio Kishida of Japan’s 13 percent. Last year the Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 20 percent of people in the G7 countries thought that they and their families would be better off in five years. Another Edelman survey, from 2020, uncovered a broad distrust of capitalism in countries across the world, “driven by a growing sense of inequity and unfairness in the system.”

Why the broad dissatisfaction with an economic system that is supposed to offer unsurpassed prosperity? Ruchir Sharma, the chairman of Rockefeller International and a Financial Times columnist, has an answer that boils down to two words: easy money. In an eye-opening new book, “What Went Wrong With Capitalism,” he makes a convincing case.

“When the price of borrowing money is zero,” Sharma told me this week, “the price of everything else goes bonkers.” To take just one example: In 2010, as the era of ultralow and even negative interest rates was getting started, the median sale price for a house in the United States hovered around $220,000. By the start of this year, it was more than $420,000.

Nowhere has inflation (in the broad sense of the term) been more evident than in global financial markets. In 1980 they were worth a total of $12 trillion — equal to the size of the global economy at the time. After the pandemic, Sharma noted, those markets were worth $390 trillion, or around four times the world’s total gross domestic product.

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How Capitalism Went Off the Rails

By Bret Stephens, Opinion Columnist @nytimes

"The social consequence of this is rage; the political consequence is populism."
https://t.co/yD7bmUnqDw

— Stefan Michaelsen (@stefanmichaelse) June 19, 2024

The Social Security and Medicare Trustees just released their annual reports on the financial status of the Social Security and Medicare programs. The Trustees project that both the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are within 12 years of insolvency and in need of trust fund solutions. Specifically, they project the Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund will run out of reserves in 2033, the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund will become insolvent by 2036, and the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) trust fund will remain solvent over the 75-year projection window. Assuming revenue is reallocated in the years between OASI and SSDI insolvency, the theoretically combined Social Security trust funds will be insolvent by 2035.

In other words, Social Security’s retirement trust fund will reach insolvency when today’s 58-year-olds reach the normal retirement age and today’s youngest retirees turn 71. At that point, all beneficiaries will face a 21 percent across-the-board benefit cut. On theoretically combined basis, all beneficiaries will face a 17 percent cut in 2035. Over the full 75-year projection window, Social Security’s combined funds faces an actuarial imbalance of 3.50 percent of taxable payroll, which is the equivalent of 1.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or 20 percent of all future benefits.

Read it all.

🚨 ANALYSIS: The latest #Medicare Trustees' projections show:

➤ The HI Trust Fund will run out of reserves in 12 years, and faces a large shortfall;
➤ Total Medicare costs will grow rapidly;
➤ Medicare's outlook has largely improved since last year, but might be far worse… pic.twitter.com/G7fyrvCILX

— CRFB.org (@BudgetHawks) May 7, 2024

It was not so long ago that the hottest topic in American politics was the ballooning national debt. In 1992 Ross Perot had the best showing for a third-party candidate in a presidential election since 1912 on a platform of fiscal probity. Two years later the Republicans seized control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, with the first item in their “Contract with America” being a pledge to balance the budget. Bill Clinton easily won re-election two years after that, in part by negotiating spending cuts with Republicans that led to America’s first surpluses in a generation.

At the start of this fiscal hullabaloo, in 1992, America’s net debt amounted to 46% of gdp. Today it has reached 96% of gdp. For the past five years, under first Donald Trump and then Joe Biden, the federal deficit has averaged 9% of gdp a year. The International Monetary Fund says that America’s borrowing is so vast it is endangering global financial stability. s&p and Fitch, two credit-rating agencies, have already downgraded America’s debt; a third, Moody’s, is threatening to.

Yet concern about deficits and debt has all but vanished from American politics. Voters seem relaxed about the subject, which barely registers in pollsters’ tallies of the biggest problems facing the country. Although Messrs Biden and Trump both tut-tut about the dire fiscal outlook from time to time, neither has made improving it a centrepiece of his campaign. On the contrary, both would in all likelihood add to America’s debts, by spending more in Mr Biden’s case and by taxing less in Mr Trump’s. Neither candidate dares breathe a word about trimming spending on health care and pensions for the elderly, which account for the biggest share of the federal budget and are set to grow still bigger as the population ages. Yet a fiscal reckoning is coming, whether the candidates admit it or not—and given the politicians’ denial, it may take an unexpected form.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

In the 1990s the hottest topic in American politics was the ballooning national debt. In 1992 this amounted to 46% of GDP; today it has reached 96%. Yet Joe Biden and Donald Trump are all but ignoring this https://t.co/S3QseVdONa 👇

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) May 5, 2024

The US faces a Liz Truss-style market shock if the government ignores the country’s ballooning federal debt, the head of Congress’s independent fiscal watchdog has warned.

Phillip Swagel, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said the mounting US fiscal burden was on an “unprecedented” trajectory, risking a crisis of the kind that sparked a run on the pound and the collapse of Truss’s government in the UK in 2022.

“The danger, of course, is what the UK faced with former prime minister Truss, where policymakers tried to take an action, and then there’s a market reaction to that action,” Swagel said in an interview with the Financial Times.

The US was “not there yet”, he said, but as higher interest rates raise the cost of paying its creditors to $1tn in 2026, bond markets could “snap back”.

Read it all.

FT Exclusive: US debt is on an 'unprecedented' trajectory that could lead to a Liz Truss-style market shock, the head of Congress’s independent fiscal watchdog has warned https://t.co/JLiKKeQE9z pic.twitter.com/ljX3OpInL1

— Financial Times (@FT) March 26, 2024

Harvard University economics professor Kenneth Rogoff said both President Joe Biden and his predecessor and challenger Donald Trump risk sending US debt levels into dangerous territory as Washington fails to grasp that the era of ultra-low interest rates won’t come back.

“Washington in general has a very relaxed attitude towards debt that I think they’re going to be sorry about,” Rogoff said on Bloomberg Television’s Wall Street Week with David Westin. “It’s just not the free lunch that Congress and perhaps the two presidential candidates have gotten used to.”

While an exact “upper limit” for the federal debt cannot be known — it’s estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to climb to 116% of US gross domestic product by 2034 from 99% today — Rogoff warned that there will be challenges as the level increases.

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Harvard's Ken Rogoff said both President Joe Biden and challenger Donald Trump risk sending US debt levels into dangerous territory https://t.co/3uWRkNCiXA via @bpolitics

— Robert Burgess (@BobOnMarkets) March 13, 2024

Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb said the US deficit is swelling to a point that it would take a miracle to reverse the damage.

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he said Monday night at an event for Universa Investments, the hedge fund firm he advises. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Taleb defined the ballooning debt load as a “white swan,” a risk that’s more probable than a surprise “black swan” event. While he didn’t identify specific outcomes in markets, he did say white swans include both the US deficit and an economy that’s far more vulnerable to shocks than in prior years.

The reason for that, he said, is that the world is far more interconnected due to globalization, with issues in one region able to ricochet around the world.

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Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb says as long as you have a government continually extending the debt limit and doing deals because they're afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, then eventually you're going to have a debt spiral. https://t.co/pQFrtVNqus

— Ben Woodward, CFA (@BennettWoodman) January 31, 2024

Schools across the country are preparing to see their budgets shift from flush to strained as billions of pandemic aid runs out in less than a year, putting at risk staffing and programs added with Covid-relief funds.

The 2023-24 school year represents the last full year in which districts can spend down what remains of the $180 billion in federal Covid-19 aid. High-poverty districts typically received more emergency relief, so now face steeper cuts as the money runs out.

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Billions in pandemic education aid runs out in under a year, posing a risk for schools that added staffing and programs with the Covid relief https://t.co/IM6bGBN2Q5

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 30, 2023

In a year when the US economy exceeded almost everybody’s expectations, the underlying federal deficit roughly doubled, spotlighting a dire fiscal trajectory likely to only worsen the partisan budget battles in Washington.

The government ran a $2.02 trillion deficit for the fiscal year through September, after adjustments to remove the impact of President Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program, which was scotched by the Supreme Court. The gap is $1.02 trillion more than the prior year.

The surge is a powerful illustration of a fiscal path that’s triggered warnings from economists, politicians and credit rating agencies. It also helps explain why yields on longer-term US Treasuries are reaching highs unseen since before the global financial crisis, with the government needing to issue ever more debt to cover the shortfall of revenues relative to spending. Ten-year yields surpassed 5% on Monday.

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The US government had a $2 trillion budget deficit for the fiscal year through September, a gap that's $1 trillion more than the prior year. https://t.co/M69cTCs6Yl pic.twitter.com/LMOoK3Nxen

— Lisa Abramowicz (@lisaabramowicz1) October 24, 2023

When it comes to the size of the federal government’s annual deficit, appearances can be deceiving.

The gap between spending and revenue for fiscal year 2023, which ended on Sept. 30, was $1.7 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office projected ahead of the official Treasury Department figures. That would be a roughly $300 billion widening in the shortfall from fiscal year 2022.

But the gap was actually much larger. That is because of the odd way President Biden’s attempt to broadly cancel student debt shows up in budget figures.

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The Federal Deficit Is Even Bigger Than It Looks: Student-debt cancellation complicates the numbers as higher interest rates make borrowing costlier https://t.co/UnnEwiCbb6 pic.twitter.com/WqwpDVfUfn

— Jesse Felder (@jessefelder) October 13, 2023

But the biggest consequences will be for the biggest borrower — namely the US government. As Greg Ip put it in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, “Rising Interest Rates Mean Deficits Finally Matter.” It is no coincidence, he argued, that “the recent rise in bond yields came as Fitch Ratings downgraded its US credit rating, Treasury upped the size of its bond auctions, analysts began revising upward this year’s federal deficit, and Congress nearly shut down parts of the government over a failure to pass spending bills.”

US fiscal policy has long been on an unsustainable trajectory — for more than 20 years, in fact. But under President Joe Biden it has jumped the shark. The federal deficit looks like it will exceed 7% of GDP in fiscal 2023, after the Congressional Budget Office adjusts for the vagaries of policy on student debt forgiveness. That is a truly shocking number for an economy that is running at close to full employment. And, as I pointed out here a month ago, there is no scenario the CBO can devise in which the total debt relative to GDP does not keep growing, with spending driven up partly by the rising burden of interest payments.

The key problem, as Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute has pointed out, is that the average maturity of the federal debt is just 76 months. So even if the CBO is right, and long-term interest rates average 4% over the next three decades, the result will still be budget deficits rising to 10% of GDP. And each additional percentage point on interest rates would add an additional $2.8 trillion of debt service costs over 10 years.

This disastrous outcome is a perfect illustration of the law of unintended consequences.

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“In terms of total returns, this is the biggest bond market rout in 150 years.”https://t.co/ufQO76ioX6 via @opinion

— Bruce Mehlman (@bpmehlman) October 10, 2023

The unexpected deficit surge, which comes amid signs of strong growth in the economy overall, is likely to shape a fierce debate on Capitol Hill about the nation’s fiscal policies as lawmakers face a potential government shutdown this fall and choices over trillions of dollars in expiring tax cuts. The Senate will return this week from August recess, and the House will be back the following week. Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) approved a deal in June to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, but it did little to alter the long-term debt trajectory.

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🇺🇸 U.S. deficit explodes even as economy grows – Washington Posthttps://t.co/IAXBFZ66WK pic.twitter.com/AEnOvk8hVP

— Christophe Barraud🛢🐳 (@C_Barraud) September 4, 2023

The Republicans have capitulated on the US debt ceiling. This averts the risk of abrupt fiscal tightening in a slowing economy that has yet to digest the most aggressive monetary squeeze in over 40 years.

The putative accord between the White House and Congress does not even try to address the larger threat to America’s economic model and hegemonic status.

The Congressional Budget Office says the US is on course for fiscal deficits of 7pc of GDP as far as the eye can see.

Sacred entitlements remain untouchable. Middle-class welfare – ie. consumption – will continue to eat up an ever-greater share of the budget. It is this that is leading to slow fiscal ruin.

The gross debt-to-GDP ratio was 62pc in 2007 (IMF data). It will be 122pc this year, and 138pc by 2028, with no sign of reaching a plateau. By then it will have overtaken Italy.

Read it all.

“It is a sobering thought that the US is racking up as much debt-to-GDP accumulation over 20 years as it did over two world wars and the Great Depression combined”

✍️ Ambrose Evans-Pritchardhttps://t.co/wWkRv2XYKd

— Telegraph Business (@telebusiness) May 30, 2023

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the government could become unable to pay bills on time by June 1. In that case, the Treasury Department could halt payments, such as to federal employees or veterans.

In a worst-case scenario, a failure to pay holders of U.S. government debt, a linchpin of the global financial system, could trigger severe recession and send stock prices plummeting and borrowing costs soaring.

Many economists don’t expect a default for the first time in U.S. history. But they outline three potential ways the standoff could affect the economy and financial system, ranging from not great to extremely scary.

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U.S. lawmakers might have just days to act before the standoff over the debt ceiling reverberates through the economy https://t.co/JM1UfZ7HfW

— Real Time Economics (@WSJecon) May 22, 2023

Republicans, who have newly taken control of the House of Representatives, say that they cannot abide runaway spending and must rein it in. This deep concern appears episodic. When Donald Trump was president, the debt ceiling was increased three times with Republican support, and the national debt rose by $8trn over his term ($3.2trn of which came before covid-induced spending began in 2020). Those increases were not particularly contentious, and the White House wishes the same for this one. “Raising the debt ceiling is not a negotiation; it is an obligation of this country and its leaders to avoid economic chaos,” Mr Biden’s press secretary said in a statement released on January 20th.

But it may not be so simple. Republicans are unlikely to let their leverage over Mr Biden lapse. Kevin McCarthy squeaked into his position of Republican speaker of the House by promising many concessions to hardliners, including pledging extreme brinkmanship over the debt ceiling. Mr McCarthy has vowed to secure spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit, and pledged to put the country on the path to a balanced budget in a decade. As part of his bargain to attain power, the beleaguered speaker also had to allow a parliamentary manoeuvre that would make his own removal easier. Mr McCarthy may not be able to keep his promises, in which case his own party could end his speakership in its first year.

This is forcing financiers, lawyers and officials to focus on the unthinkable. The starting point of such contingency planning is that a sovereign default would be cataclysmic: in all likelihood stocks would plunge, borrowing costs would soar, growth would suffer and the dollar’s status as the world’s dominant currency would be shaken. Any way to avoid this series of disasters merits attention. The problem, unfortunately, is that each proposed workaround has severe—and quite possibly unworkable—drawbacks.

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Most games of chicken do not have trillion-dollar stakes. But such a spectacle is common in America https://t.co/18TkzGkAnt

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) January 23, 2023

America’s gross national debt topped $30 trillion for the first time on Tuesday, an ominous fiscal milestone that underscores the fragile nature of the country’s long-term economic health as it grapples with soaring prices and the prospect of higher interest rates.

The breach of that threshold, which was revealed in new Treasury Department figures, arrived years earlier than previously projected as a result of trillions in federal spending that the United States has deployed to combat the pandemic. That $5 trillion, which funded expanded jobless benefits, financial support for small businesses and stimulus payments, was financed with borrowed money.

The borrowing binge, which many economists viewed as necessary to help the United States recover from the pandemic, has left the nation with a debt burden so large that the government would need to spend an amount larger than America’s entire annual economy in order to pay it off.

Some economists contend that the nation’s large debt load is not unhealthy given that the economy is growing, interest rates are low and investors are still willing to buy U.S. Treasury securities, which gives them safe assets to help manage their financial risk. Those securities allow the government to borrow money relatively cheaply and use it to invest in the economy.

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Breaking News: The U.S. national debt topped $30 trillion, years ahead of schedule, as pandemic spending fueled government borrowing. https://t.co/6yUwsPvi1P

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 1, 2022

This year, the federal government will spend $300 billion on interest payments on the national debt. This is the equivalent of nearly 9 percent of all federal revenue collection and over $2,400 per household. The federal government spends more on interest than on transportation, education, and research and development combined. The household share of federal interest is larger than average household spending on many typical expenditures, including gas, clothing, education, or personal care.

Despite historically low interest rates, this significant interest cost is the result of high levels of debt. This cost could be even worse if interest rates rise. Each one percent rise in the interest rate would increase FY 2021 interest spending by roughly $225 billion at today’s debt levels. Growing debt levels not only add to the likelihood of such increases, but also the cost and risk associated with them.

This brief puts these interest payments in context. Estimates are based on CBO’s February 2021 baseline and do not incorporate the effects of the American Rescue Plan.

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How High Are Federal Interest Payments? https://t.co/kNdbDaZh5l via @budgethawks

— Nadia Sindi (@nadiasindi) March 11, 2021

In the good old days, America’s budget deficit yawned when the economy was weak and shrank when it was strong. It fell from 13% to 4% of gdp during Barack Obama’s presidency, as the economy recovered from the financial crisis of 2007-09. Today unemployment is at a 50-year low. Yet borrowing is rising fast. Tax cuts in 2017 and higher government spending have widened the deficit to 5.5% of gdp, according to imf data—the largest, by far, of any rich country.

It could soon widen even further. President Donald Trump is thought to want a pre-election giveaway. Fox News is awash with rumours of “Tax Cuts 2.0”. This month the Treasury announced it would issue a 20-year bond, which would lengthen the average maturity of its debt and lock in low interest rates for longer. All this is quite a change for many Republicans, who once accused Mr Obama of profligacy, but now say that trillion-dollar deficits are no big deal. Democratic presidential candidates, meanwhile, are talking about Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. A new consensus on fiscal policy has descended on Washington. Can it hold?

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America’s deficit—5.5% of GDP—is the largest by far of any rich country. It could soon widen even further https://t.co/nI60RGfNnW

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) January 26, 2020

“You have so little room to respond during the next crisis,” MacGuineas says.

In reality, though, it’s unlikely bond investors will hesitate to finance additional U.S. spending to combat another downturn, Ashworth says. After all, he says, even if U.S. debt-to-GDP approaches 100 percent, that’s still well below 130-percent-plus ratios in countries such as Italy and Japan.

Chris Edwards, senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, notes that while the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is lower, its economy, and debt level, are much larger. He calls the deficit buildup “disastrous.”

Capital Economics’ Neil Shearing is more worried about political resistance in Congress to a massive stimulus if the nation’s debt burden hits nosebleed levels.

Zandi isn’t concerned. “If we get into a mess, policymakers will ignore the deficit and do what they need to do,” he says.

Yet MacGuineas says the patience of bondholders and lawmakers eventually will run thin.

“We don’t know when that is, and we don’t want to try to find out.”

Read it all.

Recent tax and spending legislation made our fiscal outlook worse, said Foundation CEO Michael Peterson. https://t.co/Z7r14c2fwm

— Peterson Foundation (@pgpfoundation) February 6, 2019

A picture with SO many implications…. #economy #politics #demographics #babyboomers #entitlements #budget #generationalconflict pic.twitter.com/zOhjr9BFWN

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) October 12, 2017

Mr. [John] Cogan has just written a riveting, massive book, “The High Cost of Good Intentions,” on the history of entitlements in the U.S., and he describes how in 1972 the Senate “attached an across-the-board, permanent increase of 20% in Social Security benefits to a must-pass bill” on the debt ceiling. President Nixon grumbled loudly but signed it into law. In October, a month before his re-election, “Nixon reversed course and availed himself of an opportunity to take credit for the increase,” Mr. Cogan says. “When checks went out to some 28 million recipients, they were accompanied by a letter that said that the increase was ‘signed into law by President Richard Nixon.’ ”

The Nixon episode shows, says Mr. Cogan, that entitlements have been the main cause of America’s rising national debt since the early 1970s. Mr. Trump’s pact with the Democrats is part of a pattern: “The debt ceiling has to be raised this year because elected representatives have again failed to take action to control entitlement spending.”

A faculty member at Stanford’s Public Policy Program and a fellow at the university’s Hoover Institution, Mr. Cogan, 70, is one of those old-fangled American men who are always inclined to play down their achievements. The latest of his is the book that draws us together in conversation. To be published later this month by Stanford University Press, it is a 400-page account of how federal entitlement programs evolved across two centuries “and the common forces that have been at work in causing their expansion.”

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One of President Donald Trump’s first promises after getting elected was to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure—bridges, roads, tunnels, pipes, dams. And whether you’ve had to evacuate a town in the shadow of a crumbling dam, buy filters for tainted municipal water, or even just bounced over potholes on a highway, you’ve experienced the problems the president alluded to.

Well, it really is as bad as you think. The American Society of Civil Engineers has just released its latest infrastructure report card, and grades the United States at D plus. That means the country’s public works are in substandard condition, with a risk of failure. The ASCE releases its reports every four years, and the mark hasn’t changed since the last time. “While our nation’s infrastructure problems are significant, they are solvable,” says ASCE President Norma Jean Mattei. But that’ll take money.

So … $1 trillion, right? Great news! Except the ASCE report says it’ll take $4.59 trillion to bring things up to a B, or adequate grade, by 2025. That’s a shortfall of $2 trillion over current spending plans. Again: $1 trillion is nowhere near enough.

Read it all.

Yes, this country can handle the nearly $600 billion federal deficit estimated for 2016. But the deficit has grown sharply this year, and will keep the national debt at about 75 percent of the gross domestic product, a ratio not seen since 1950, after the budget ballooned during World War II.

Long-term, that continued growth, driven by our tax and spending policies, will create the most significant fiscal challenge facing our country. The widely respected Congressional Budget Office has estimated that by midcentury our debt will rise to 140 percent of G.D.P., far above that in any previous era, even in times of war.

Unfortunately, despite a brief discussion during the final presidential debate, neither candidate has put forward a convincing plan to restrain the growth of the national debt in the decades to come.

Read it all. For a very important background on this, please see this 2011 post and the comments thereon, in which Boston University’s Laurence J. Kotlikoff makes clear that the true figure of our actual indebtedness is in excess of 200 Trillion dollars–KSH.

Americans have major doubts about the financial health of Social Security.

A new survey by Pew Research Center finds that 41 percent of Americans think there will be no Social Security benefits for them when they retire and nearly a third expect reduced levels of benefits. (Tweet This)

Some of those fears may be overblown. “People who think they will get zero benefits from Social Security are wrong and they should look at the facts,” said Andy Landis, a former claims representative for the Social Security Administration (SSA) and author of “Social Security: The Inside Story.”

There are concerns that benefits may be reduced, however.

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Disneyland has become a time capsule not of the romantic idea of 19th century Main Street or even the possibilities in Tomorrowland but of a time when Americans believed in a better future ”” and were willing to invest in it. A half-century ago, we put almost 1 percent of our economy into landing men on the moon, yet today we fall behind other countries in exploring space, supposedly because we cannot afford it.

We pay a huge price for our lack of investment and faith in the future of America. We pay for all the inefficiency of our decrepit infrastructure. We pay with minds that will never be fully developed and with scientific breakthroughs that will enrich other countries. And we pay with lives of daily grind and unpleasantness without hope of respite.

Would that as a people we thought like Walt Disney so we could make America into a happy place.

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Shaw Air Force Base was spared in this round of the Air Force’s budget cuts, losing no jobs, but Joint Base Charleston will have 19 positions eliminated.

The announced cuts were the first permanent jobs lost in South Carolina in what is expected to to be a deep reduction in the military following 13 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. State leaders are preparing to fight for the state’s seven installations, based mostly in Columbia, Charleston and Beaufort.

The installations and their missions, as well as a large National Guard, numerous defense contractors in the Upstate and a high number of retirees, especially on the coast, pump nearly $16 billion a year into the state’s economy, according to a study by the S.C. Department of Commerce.

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The $2.8 trillion Social Security Trust Fund is on track to be totally spent by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

That’s one year earlier than projected in 2013 and a decade earlier than the CBO estimated as recently as 2011.

The CBO delivered the warning in a gloomy long-term budget outlook that shows federal debt reaching 106% of GDP in 25 years, up from 74% now.

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In the first large-scale study to directly measure wasteful spending in Medicare, researchers found that Medicare spent $1.9 billion in 2009 for patients to receive any of 26 tests and procedures that have been shown by empirical studies to offer little or no health benefit.

By analyzing Medicare claims data, researchers in the Harvard Medical School Department of Health Care Policy found that at least one in four Medicare recipients received one or more of these services in 2009. What’s more, those 26 services are just a small sample of the hundreds of services that are known to provide little or no medical value to patients in many circumstances.

“We suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said study author J. Michael McWilliams, associate professor of health care policy. The study appears today in JAMA Internal Medicine.

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We start with this reality: Social Security and Medicare are practically sacrosanct. Nearly nine-in-ten Americans say they’re good for the country. That’s an amazing number. But the popularity of these programs really isn’t all that surprising. People love them because they do what they were created to do. They ease many of the frets and dreads of old age ”“ a blessing not just for seniors but for everyone who loves, supports and depends on seniors. Which is to say, everyone.

But the status quo is unsustainable. Some 10,000 Baby Boomers will be going on Social Security and Medicare every single day between now and 2030. By the time everyone in this big pig-in-the-python generation is drawing benefits, we’ll have just two workers per beneficiary ”“ down from three-to-one now, five-to-one in 1960 and more than forty-to-one in 1945, shortly after Social Security first started supporting beneficiaries.

The math of the 20th century simply won’t work in the 21st. Today’s young are paying taxes to support a level of benefits for today’s old that they have no realistic chance of receiving when they become old. And they know it ”“ just 6% of Millennials say they expect to receive full benefits from Social Security when they retire. Fully half believe they’ll get nothing.

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