Balder Ex-Libris

Authors : Kotlikoff Laurence Jacob - Burns Scott
Title : The coming generational storm What you need to know about America’s economic future
Year : 2004

Link download : Kotlikoff_Laurence_Jacob_-_Burns_Scott_-_The_coming_generational_storm.zip

Preface to the Paperback Edition. The more things change, the more they remain the same. —Alphonse Karr. When it comes to describing how America’s taxing and spending policies will affect future generations—its generational policy—the old adage quoted above runs in reverse. The more things remain the same, the more things change. What’s staying the same is our decades-long practice of fiscal child abuse. What’s changing, and for the worse, is the fiscal burden we are passing along to our kids. Indeed, in the year since publication of the hardback edition of The Coming Generational Storm, the official 2004 federal deficit reached a record high—$413 billion! This amounts to $105,000 per child born that year. Even more ominous, the nation’s implicit debt—its promises to pay future Social Security pension benefits to retirees and Medicare and Medicaid health care benefits to the elderly and the poor—increased over the year by roughly $1 trillion, or $250,000 per newborn! No wonder those babies came out screaming. While these obligations increased, our politicians did their best to ignore them. During the long 2004 presidential election campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry treated us to hundreds of speeches. Yet they studiously avoided acknowledging the nation’s long-term insolvency and its implications for future generations. When the issue of deficits did come up, the Republican president said that lowering tax rates would eventually raise tax revenues. The Democratic senator said spending more now would eventually mean spending less later. ...