"Unless we relieve the financial burden of public debt, the US is going to become a miserable place to live in about ten years..."

Commenting on Dana Milbank in the WaPo, SST/ here

"Greece's national debt last year reached 113 percent of gross domestic product. The United States will hit that in about 2020, according to the Government Accountability Office, assuming policy continues as it has. And last year's U.S. budget deficit amounted to 9.9 percent of GDP, nearly rivaling Greece's 12.7 percent.

To pull Greece back from the edge, Papandreou has promised to cut the deficit to 3 percent of GDP by 2012. For the U.S. government to make an equivalent cut, it would have to shut down the Pentagon and a few other agencies: the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, plus the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA -- and even then we'd come up a few dollars short. " Milbank

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...... there is nothing funny about his economic prophecy. We have lived far too high on the hog. We are in the process of going broke and the great majority seem oblivious. The debt crisis is THE crisis. Unless we relieve the financial burden of public debt, the United States is going to become a miserable place to live in about ten years.

All those people who are fretting over the erosion of constitutional rights in this country are going to have a lot more pressing things to obsess over. Americans continue to live in a dreamworld in which they are entitled to the best of everything, security from violence, enough junk food to make them the fattest people in history and a Toyota in every driveway. I suppose they would rather have a Ford now.

Let's sober up folks. pl