If this isn’t enough to get Mitt Romney elected President of The United States…I guess it could be worse, as Obama stated?
The Congressional Budget Office released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook this week. Last year’s was a tragedy, but the new one is a horror story. The crushing burden of government debt and persistent unemployment — which, contrary to the carefully massaged statistics released for public consumption, has really been in double digits for years, when the collapsing work force is taken into account — will conspire with skyrocketing taxes after the expiration of the Bush tax rates, and leave us with only 1.1 percent projected GDP growth next year.
The government is still spending nearly a quarter of the total U.S. economy every year, and trillion dollar deficits have become the new normal. In fact, during only one year in the CBO’s 10-year projection do we get below a $1 trillion deficit, and it’s not by much. The government will be spending over $6 trillion a year by 2022. And none of that accounts for the ticking time bomb of unfunded entitlement liabilities, due to Social Security and Medicare, which Washington deals with by officially ignoring them.
Macro-economics and the discussion of public debt often involve numbers so huge that it makes our eyes water. Here are some simple numbers to ponder: the health of the private sector calls for growth of about three percent, to drive job creation commensurate with population increase. Financing our government without massive deficits would take more like five percent, and actually resolving the debt crisis would demand seven percent growth or more, sustained over many years. Our government-controlled economy is completely incapable of reaching any of those growth levels. There is no way to make this equation work without making the government dramatically smaller.
America should carefully ponder those difficult growth targets before entertaining the notion of another four years under the people who got us to the “new normal” of one percent growth. They’re talking about buying a shiny new saddle and spurs for a work horse that’s about to drop dead in its tracks.
—John Hayward
Source: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=49242
