This fifty one minute interview is well worth your time. If government does not address the deficit, we will be a nation in decline – we’ll be Greece.
Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson
Charlie Rose, March 29, 2012
The little facts and figures in this interview are impressive but so is the bottom line. The bottom line:
· The entitlement problem is nation ruining. The deficits are a cancer and they will destroy the country from within.
· We cannot fix it by raising taxes or cutting spending or growing the economy; we must do all of those things and reform entitlements too.
· The fix cannot be accomplished without bipartisan, bicameral action. It would be especially helpful if we had a President that would lead the effort – like Bowles and Simpson – by telling the nation the simple truth.
· This may well not be a problem we are handing to our children; this issue may destroy the nation within our lifetime.
· With these deficits, we absolutely limit the national GDP growth to just a percent or two. With that growth, 8% unemployment or more is basically guaranteed.
You probably know that we have a $16 trillion national debt that is growing by $1.3 trillion each year. Here’s the cute stuff:
· If you spent one dollar every second, it’ll take over 32,000 years to spend just one trillion dollars.
· If some church spent $1 million a day every day since the birth of Christ, they wouldn’t have spent a trillion yet.
· And we owe 16 of those trillions …
Last year 100% of the revenue available to government was spent on interest and mandatory expenditures – entitlements. Every other dollar we spent we had to borrow. Bowles says that we regularly guarantee Taiwan that we will protect them from any risk of attack from China; the only problem with that is we would have to borrow the money from China to do it.
These two guys are traveling the country speaking the simple truth.
These guys talk to everyone, left and right. Typically they speak for 15 minutes and then take an hour and a half of questions. They always get a standing ovation at the end.
Everybody gets it. “This is terrible, this is awful, this must be fixed” … “but don’t touch mine.”
We’re lucky to have them. Now we need to listen.
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