The director of the US Congressional Budget Office says there is a disconnect between the services that taxpayers expect from government (especially Social Security and Medicare for the elderly) and the amount they are wiling to pay in taxes for those services. Something big needs to happen to close that gap, he says.
The scary thing is that long-term US budget problems were enormous well before the Great Recession. Add trillions in new debt and the potential for trillions more in new spending programs to the equation, and the stakes rise and the day of reckoning only moves closer.
The one bright spot for the US is that it is demographically younger than Japan and Europe, which will be in similar binds even more quickly than the US of A.