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SC Nebraska | Full disclosure---I am big into silver, just call me Frytown Jr.
IMO the risk of a balanced budget is less than zero....if they get the annual deficit under 500 billion I would be shocked. I am a huge fiscal conservative, but at this point I realize a balanced budget is probably pie in the sky dreaming.
When you start looking at 10 year projections the economic growth they are projecting is almost laughable at this point...that is the only thing that makes the deficit look tolerable in the future.
What I would hope for and don't see as unrealistic, and have heard mentioned some on TV, is to get revenues to approx 18% of GDP, and spending to approx 21% of GDP. I think currently we are somewhere in the 15% and 24% range, so this looks like a compromise to me. Some rough calculations mean somewhere around $450 Billion in increased revenue annually, and approximately the same in spending reductions. That would leave a somewhat more manageable deficit of around $300-500 billion. The problem with this is with the enemic economy if we did this overnight it would throw us into a recession. Thus it gives the politicians a built in excuse to kick the can down the road some more. IMO you have your choice, take the medicine now knowing it will cause some serious side effects, or die from the disease a few years down the road.
The secret to everything is economic growth. If we can get the economy going again that would make the solutions much simpler. However, what is going to spark our economy? Much of the economic growth in the last 30 years or so has been somewhat phantom, much of it a byproduct of financial alchemy. The one true engine that drove the economy was the birth of the Internet. Maybe Al Gore has some cool new invention to help us out?
We need some leaders now as desperately as we ever have as a country, and so far I haven't seen any on either side of the aisle.
I will stop now before this delves any farther into Boiler Room territory...
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