@Peterm99 -

Quote:

The good news is that we can be entertained by watching the states that are at the forefront of the "give illegals free healthcare" open borders movement (e.g., Calif) get screwed really hard. The bad news is that the rest of the states will only have a slight delay before we ALL get shafted as well when things fall apart.

Exactly.

But this is also why the only fix is political, whether peacefully so or otherwise.

You can't "grow" yourself out of this hole because the "growth" is not real. Further debt accumulation returns less than a dollar for each dollar of debt; once you cross that rubicon "stimulus" makes it worse in real terms. It LOOKS better in the statistics, but only if you refuse to look at the OTHER HALF of the balance sheet. That's profoundly dishonest and anyone who has ever run a business, works for a financial concern (including one what reports on financial matters) or has any bookkeeping or accounting training whatsoever knows it.

There are real solution to this problem that don't involve a complete meltdown. One of them would be to invoke my "low hanging fruit" Ticker as a law. That would take about $400 billion a year out of federal spending all on its own between Medicare and Medicaid. That by itself would lift GDP in real terms back into positive territory for a few years. It wouldn't, unfortunately, stop the detonation in CMS, but it WOULD extend it a decade or so and it MIGHT keep GDP positive enough in real terms to give you the margin to restore rates to a sane level without causing an instant detonation in the federal fiscal outcome. I

At the same time it would take a large whack out of the pension and state funding problems too. I don't have a good way to put numbers on that aspect of it, since the data is too sparse for me to be able to wrap my arms around it in a form I can trust.

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