America's #1 problem "isn’t Islamo-fascism". It is debt.

Michael Kinsley puts it so well, as he always does:

The biggest peril Americans now face isn’t Islamo-fascism. It’s our own inability to live within our means. It would be nice to give our country the wisdom and self-discipline to stop running up the credit card. And we should try. But it’s unlikely that we can remake the national character (including our own) in 19 years. What we can do is offer a lecture and a fresh start. We should pass on to the next generation an America that’s free from debt. Instead of ignoring it, or arguing endlessly about whose fault it is and who should pay for it, Boomers as an age cohort should just grab the check and say, “This one’s on us.”

The "we" in this excerpt? The boomers.

Kinsley then threads the needle:

We may legitimately disagree about the timing of any Great Fiscal Clean-Up: do we need a second or third jolt of stimulus first to nail shut the coffin of the Great Recession, adding a trillion or more in IOUs to the pile before turning to the task of reducing the pile? Maybe so. But money well spent is still money spent. The Great Recession may have been a legitimate reason for putting off the day of reckoning—just as a cold may be a good reason to put off a necessary heart operation—but the cold doesn’t cure your heart problem or eliminate the need for the operation.

Not convinced?  Here are some hard data that Kinsley then provides:

pick a document at random from the pile. Here’s one: the latest annual “Long-Term Budget Outlook” of the Congressional Budget Office, published in June. The future is especially hard to predict at this moment, because current law includes several things that are unlikely to happen, such as the expiration of the George W. Bush tax cuts, and major unspecified cuts in defense and other spending programs. But making reasonable assumptions about these matters, the CBO projects that the national debt—nearly 62 percent of GDP—will rise to 87 percent of GDP by 2020 (a decade away), 109 percent (its previous peak, during World War II) by 2025, and 185 percent by 2035. “After that, the growing imbalance between revenues and noninterest spending, combined with spiraling interest payments, would swiftly push debt to unsustainable levels.”

Of course, I am with Kinsley all the way here. My blogging track-record also shows that I have forever been worrying about the rapidly growing debt.  It is simply bizarre that everybody talks about it, but nobody wants to do anything.  Nothing is done because reducing debt will require honest discussions about where government expenditures ought to be chopped off, and for every expenditure there is an equally strong lobby to retain that particular expenditure and cut somewhere else.

As the Economist notes:

To get spending down to the level we're taxed at, we'd have to cut back to persistent levels of federal spending we haven't seen in 50 years. Average federal spending in the 1960s was 18.6% of GDP. In the 1970s it was 20.1% of GDP. In the 1980s it was 22.2% of GDP. In the 1990s it was 20.7% of GDP. In the 2000s it was 20.0% of GDP. In the 1950s, federal spending was 17.6% of GDP, but in the 1950s, there was no Medicare or Medicaid.
And this is all the data can tell us. The data can't tell us whether we want to go back to the levels of federal spending we had in the 1950s. That's a question of value that voters have to decide.

The scarier aspect is that this is not the only story. Again, as I have blogged referring to a number of commentators, there is another issue as well--the budgetary crises at local and state governments. The only good news here is that these entities cannot print money as the federal government can!

Maybe the Onion was on the right track after all, in terms of how to solve this problem :)

U.S. Government Wipes Out National Debt