The Inevitability of a U.S. Government Default

摘要

There is a ticking time bomb in the U.S. government's fiscal structure: growing government spending, which, if unchanged by policy, will result in growing government debt. This is not the short-run problem that we hear so much about in the news when Congress gets to vote on increasing the ceiling for the U.S. federal debt. It is the long-run problem that economists such as Laurence Kotlikoff (Kotlikoff and Burns 2004; Kotlikoff 2011; Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters 2006), among others, have been writing about for years.