Something to Ponder
I can't believe it's been almost a month since my last post.  There are plenty of post coming.  In the meantime, here is a post I saw last week on the blog Marginal Revolution that's worth thinking about:

The challenge

David Leonhardt spells it out clearly:

As a rough estimate, the government will need to find spending cuts and tax increases equal to 7 to 10 percent of G.D.P. The longer we wait, the bigger the cuts will need to be (because of the accumulating interest costs).
Seven percent of G.D.P. is about $1 trillion today. In concrete terms, Medicare’s entire budget is about $450 billion. The combined budgets of the Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation and Veterans Affairs Departments are less than $600 billion.
This is why fixing the budget through spending cuts alone, as Congressional Republicans say they favor, would be so hard.

Here is related commentary.

The permalink is here, but includes all the comments, many that are inane partisan blather.  Marginal Revolution is a libertarian blog.