Fascinating stuff for policy buffs and data junkies. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending/
He's saying what Democrats are denying and fighting any effort to fix - that entitlements are killing us.
I read that article earlier today... I think he's wrong about a couple of pretty big things. He says the debt is fine because we can service it at low interest rates. And those low interest rates are locked in for a long time (t-bill maturation dates). What he's missing is QE, which is $3T (so far) of govt. printing money and buying back those longer term bonds with that money. Once at the whim of short-term bond buyers, interest rates could go up in a hurry. Which leads to the second point. An increase of .04% in the interest rates means we just spent all the money made by raising taxes on the rich by 10%. On interest. It is mindboggling that anyone would suggest that borrowing incredibly large sums of money to spend on payments to individuals or operating the govt.'s day to day business is a good idea.
