Two great pictures: “Off-budget” means social security — it’s currently running a surplus of around 1.5% of GDP or over $150 billion/year. Hardly a crisis, that. The general fund, however, is running a deficit in the neighborhood of 5% of GDP. That’s about $600b for 2004 (based on these somewhat dated numbers.) Now that sounds […]

I have two New Year’s resolutions: (1) try even harder to find ways to elicit bipartisan support for fiscal responsibility; and (2) Brad Setser’s blog more often. For those grown-up Republicans who wish to support (1), read this from Brad: Take out social security, which takes in more revenue than it spends, and the budget […]

Josh Marshall on SSRI: … The United States has a bit over $7 trillion in accumulated national debt … After 1980 we started borrowing money big-time to finance our deficits — in large part because of tax cuts on high-income earners. However you want to slice it, we started spending substantially more than we were […]

Senator Says Lifetime Terror Detentions ‘Bad Idea’: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A reported U.S. plan to keep some suspected terrorists imprisoned for a lifetime even if the government lacks evidence to charge them in courts was swiftly condemned on Sunday as a “bad idea” by a leading Republican senator. The Pentagon and the CIA have asked […]