Share this Business Week article with your liberal friends

Business Week has a great article explaining the problem of the fiscal gap and how it is not a partisan issue.

Share this. Just because it is an eye opener, the liberal you speak to, might be awakened. A bit.  Even if not, it never hurts to try.

Worried about the economic future of your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren? Brace yourself for a big number. By one prominent economist’s calculation, the U.S. federal government faces a long-term “fiscal gap”—the difference between projected future expenditures and receipts—of about $200 trillion.

This sounds like the kind of thing that’s embraced by deficit hawks and small-government types on the Right and strongly resisted by most Democrats. In fact, the fiscal gap is a nonpartisan accounting concept. Twelve winners of the Nobel prize for economics have endorsed a bill to require the federal government to do an official annual calculation of the fiscal gap (as opposed to the $200 trillion figure, which is a rough and unofficial estimate). The luminary endorsers of the bill, who rarely find common ground on political issues, include liberal Kenneth Arrow and conservative Robert Lucas.

The closing paragraph even points out how well sequestration seems to have worked. The number will astound you.

Read the rest here.