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My secret reason for my wanderlust
May 21, 2005 ( politics )
This article by the Washington Post that Dad forwarded me is a perfect description of why I want to find a career that gets me out of this country on occasion, an gives me contacts globally. Beyond the attraction of travel and development work, it's a nice back-door when US turns into Argentina II:
The timing could not have been more apt. On the eve of a titanic partisan clash in the Senate, eggheads of the left and right got together yesterday to warn both parties that they are ignoring the country's most pressing problem: that the United States is turning into Argentina....
With startling unanimity, they agreed that without some combination of big tax increases and major cuts in Medicare, Social Security and most other spending, the country will fall victim to the huge debt and soaring interest rates that collapsed Argentina's economy and caused riots in its streets a few years ago.
"The only thing the United States is able to do a little after 2040 is pay interest on massive and growing federal debt," Walker said. "The model blows up in the mid-2040s. What does that mean? Argentina."
"All true," Sawhill, a budget official in the Clinton administration, concurred.
"To do nothing," Butler added, "would lead to deficits of the scale we've never seen in this country or any major in industrialized country. We've seen them in Argentina. That's a chilling thought, but it would mean that."
...
The unity of the bespectacled presenters was impressive -- and it made their conclusion all the more depressing. As Ron Haskins, a former Bush White House official and current Brookings scholar, said when introducing the thinkers: "If Heritage and Brookings agree on something, there must be something to it."...
And where is that? "No republic in the history of the world lasted more than 300 years," Walker said. "Eventually, the crunch comes."
Posted by griffjon at May 21, 2005 12:25 PM
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