This article was flagged on Drudge this morning too. It can be found on the Financial Times web site, but the link is too screwy for our new HTML rules*. When you locate the article, be SURE to read the interviews linked on the same page. The original paper can be found here. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, can be found here.

I'm not sure this article makes the point the Democrats are hoping for, i.e. that George W. Bush is trying to conceal the idea that America is heading for a debt crisis, or that his tax cuts are responsible for this.

If you think this approaching trainwreck is news to the Republicans, guess again. Fiscal conservatives and libertarians have been harping for twenty years about the massive American wealth redistribution system (half to two-thirds of the total annual Federal budget) running out of money somewhere in the early part of the twenty-first century. This was one of Reagan's major concerns, and he got endless abuse for it.

Please note: Of the 44.2 trillion dollars, 7 trillion is Social Security, and 36.6 is Medicare.

In other words, wealth redistribution to the elderly is over 98 percent of the problem.

Please have a cup of tea and ponder that for a while.

It ain't military spending.
It ain't education.
It ain't NASA.
It ain't building dams.
It ain't building roads.
It ain't corporate welfare.
It ain't ANY discretionary spending.

And it sure as hell ain't the tax cuts.

It's raw welfare. The Democratic Party sacred cow.

Wealth redistribution is killing the nation. I'm going to rub your faces in this until you have to come up for air.

From the original paper:

How large must spending cuts or revenue increases be to eliminate the current $44.2 trillion FI? We estimate that to achieve fiscal sustainability, an additional 16.6 percent of annual payrolls would have to be taxed away forever beginning today. Alternatively, income tax revenues would have to be hiked permanently by another two-thirds beginning immediately. Yet another alternative would be to permanently eliminate all future federal
discretionary outlays.

(Italics in original)

Any and all largely Republican attempts to try and fix this (privatizing Social Security, Medicare reform, etc.) have resulted in Democrats screaming and leaping for the jugular of the unfortunate politician who had the nerve to suggest that we can't live off our seed corn forever.

It is worth noting that even under these circumstances, many of these same Democrats are even now proposing massive additional health care entitlements. This is the budgetary equivalent of throwing an anvil to a man treading water, but God forbid anyone point this out. A normal person might think this was less than sane, unless the idea of gaining power for a few years is considered worth bankrupting America in the long run.

You can't keep robbing Peter to pay Paul forever, and the Democratic "higher taxes" solution of simply robbing more from Peter isn't going to work. Socialism doesn't work. Socialism NEVER works. European nanny states are heading down the same tube.

You figure out what would happen to this country's economy given a 66 percent across-the-board tax increase.

If you want this fixed, you can't do it by getting rid of Bush's tax cuts. The percentage of these cuts compared to $44 trillion is almost imperceptible.

What needs to be done is to ramp back the massive wealth redistribution that is killing this country. Any liberal with intelligence will realize this. The lunatic Left will keep us heading toward the oncoming train, but they are suicidal to start with.

Twenty years ago I had hoped that there would be a thriving off-Earth libertarian civilization going before the shit hit the fan in America. No such luck. And the politicians aren't going to make the hard decisions necessary.

I'm open for suggestions.

*The horrible cut-and-paste (HCAP) link:

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1051390392975&p=1012571727092