A "53-Trillion Dollar Asteroid"?

This argues we should leave Social Security benefits alone:

Time to honour America’s debt to the retired, by John Shilling, Commentary, Financial Times: The first American baby boomers have now become eligible to retire and start drawing on Social Security... Many politicians are telling us that the resulting rise in Social Security “entitlement” payments will break the budget, so we have to cut benefits to retired people. But the politicians do not want to mention that the Social Security system has been compiling a huge surplus. Why? Because they have been using that surplus for years to hide the real size of the current federal budget deficit, allowing them to spend more and justify tax cuts for the wealthy. ...

Social Security was initially a pay-as-you-go system – annual payroll taxes of workers covered that year’s payments to retired people. By the early 1980s, however, it was clear that this system was not sustainable. Payments were increasing faster than revenues, and when the baby boomers started retiring and collecting pensions, there would be huge shortfalls. President Ronald Reagan had the prudence to address this problem early enough to make Social Security sustainable. ... Social Security payroll taxes were raised, creating a surplus in the trust fund that would fully cover the future costs of baby-boomer retirement. ...

Baby boomers, and all others who have worked since 1983, paid in more than needed for Social Security retirement payments. They saved and created the trust fund surplus, which now amounts to more than $2,000bn and must be invested in US Treasury bonds. It is projected to reach nearly $3,000bn in 10 years. Then Social Security will stop generating a surplus to subsidise the rest of the budget and will begin redeeming its bonds to help make payments.

Current projections show that the trust fund bonds may be exhausted by about 2041. The trust fund’s full sustainability for at least the next 75 years could be restored easily with minor adjustments...

Politicians understand that, with the Social Security Trust Fund surplus declining, they will no longer be able to borrow from them under the table while announcing fictitiously smaller deficits to justify continued expenditures and tax cuts. And they will have to generate funds from other sources of revenue to redeem the bonds after 2017. Rather than admit too much was borrowed recently, and must now be repaid, they want to reduce Social Security benefits. This puts much of the burden on the middle class, who created most of the surplus that has been used to hide the real size of the deficits.

Fundamentally, the Social Security issue is not one of “entitlements” but of the obligation of our government to honour its debt and not reduce Social Security benefits.

There has been lots written and discussed in the media on Social Security, but not nearly as much on the real problem, rising health care costs.

Maybe one reason people are so confused about about the Social Security funding issue and the degree to which it is a problem is due to imagery like this from supposedly trusted news sources:

The broadcast itself did mention health costs and Medicare, but it would have been difficult to tell from the broadcast, or from Wolf Blitzer's questions and presentation, that the rising cost of health care rather than Social Security is the source of the problems. And the interview with Glenn Beck didn't help at all.

Update: See pgl at Angry Bear who also noticed Beck's claim.

Comments

[kthomas]

Wolf Blitzer would make an outstanding Minister of Propaganda and Misinformation.

[bp]

blitzer and beck interviewing each other
on behalf of the last hedge fund frontier

like vultures circling a kill in process
drowning in the bathtub by msm

speaking of asteroids beck
what's the risk of getting hit by one

with illegals and muslims on it
lower than ss going broke i bet

everything else is taken
medical went to insurance and pharma

walmart took consumer goods
private contractors run the military

big energy went green enough
to undermine green

the rest is hitting flat spots
or went to china

ok beck, tomorrow you take eco-terrorists
and ask me if they drove up the price of gasoline

here, in the situation room

[bakho]

There are plenty of ways to fund SS other than payroll taxes alone. The 1983 SS plan was a huge increase in payroll taxes that partly offset the Reagan tax cuts for the wealthy. It amounted to a tax shift from the wealthy to working class.

No matter how SS is funded, the money to pay out current SS benefits must necessarily come out of the current economy just as future SS benefits must necessarily come out of the future economy. A trust fund only has meaning if it in some way stimulates future productivity such that the increased demands of the future retirees are met by the increased productivity of the future workers.

Nowhere has future productivity been more squandered than in the delivery of health care. Health care reform was killed in the 1990s for the benefits of special interests and partisan political advantage. Our continued failure to use current SS taxation to improve future health care services can undermine future retirees.

[piglet]

When economists say that the current federal deficit level is not so bad - only 2% of GDP or so, is the money borrowed from the trust funds included in that figure or not? And is it included in the total debt figures that are usually presented (which I don,t eevn remember how high they are)?

[Patricia Shannon]

U.S. National debt figures recently came out to $30,000 per person

[Patricia Shannon]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22081728/

National debt grows $1 million a minute
Government borrowing averages $30,000 for every American

updated 11:37 a.m. ET, Mon., Dec. 3, 2007

WASHINGTON - Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It's expanding by about $1.4 billion a day — or nearly $1 million a minute.

What's that mean to you?

It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States.
...
The national debt — the total accumulation of annual budget deficits — is up from $5.7 trillion when President Bush took office in January 2001 and it will top $10 trillion sometime right before or right after he leaves in January 2009.

That's $10,000,000,000,000.00, or one digit more than an odometer-style "national debt clock" near New York's Times Square can handle. When the privately owned automated clock was activated in 1989, the national debt was $2.7 trillion.
...
Aggravating the debt picture: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates could cost $2.4 trillion over the next decade

Despite vows in both parties to restrain federal spending, the national debt as a percentage of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product has grown from about 35 percent in 1975 to around 65 percent today. By historical standards, it's not proportionately as high as during World War II _ when it briefly rose to 120 percent of GDP, but it's a big chunk of liability.

"The problem is going forward," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard and Poors, a major credit-rating agency.

"Our estimate is that the national debt will hit 350 percent of the GDP by 2050 under unchanged policy. Something has to change, because if you look at what's going to happen to expenditures for entitlement programs after us baby boomers start to retire, at the current tax rates, it doesn't work," Wyss said.
...
Who is loaning Washington all this money?

Ordinary investors who buy Treasury bills, notes and U.S. savings bonds, for one. Also it is banks, pension funds, mutual fund companies and state, local and increasingly foreign governments. This accounts for about $5.1 trillion of the total and is called the "publicly held" debt. The remaining $4 trillion is owed to Social Security and other government accounts, according to the Treasury Department, which keeps figures on the national debt down to the penny on its Web site.
...
Foreign governments and investors now hold some $2.23 trillion — or about 44 percent — of all publicly held U.S. debt. That's up 9.5 percent from a year earlier.

Japan is first with $586 billion, followed by China ($400 billion) and Britain ($244 billion). Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries account for $123 billion, according to the Treasury.
...
"We pay in interest four times more than we spend on education and four times what it will cost to cover 10 million children with health insurance for five years," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
...
The deficit only reflects the gap between government spending and tax revenues for one year.
...
Even during the four most recent years when there was a budget surplus, 1998-2001, the national debt ranged between $5.5 trillion and $5.8 trillion.
...
Not long ago, it actually looked like the national debt could be paid off — in full. In the late 1990s, the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office projected a surplus of a $5.6 trillion over ten years — and calculated the debt would be paid off as early as 2006.

Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan recently wrote that he was "stunned" and even troubled by such a prospect. Among other things, he worried about where the government would park its surplus if Treasury bonds went out of existence because they were no longer needed.
...
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, said he's more concerned that interest on the national debt will become unsustainable than he is that foreign countries will dump their dollar holdings — something that would undermine the value of their own vast holdings. "We're going to have to shell out a lot of resources to make those interest payments. There's a very strong argument as to why it's vital that we address our budget issues before they get measurably worse," Zandi said.

"Of course, that's not going to happen until after the next president is in the White House," he added.

[SGC]

Dang! I thought the $53 trillion asteroid was new data on the size of the credit default swap market.

Whenever I hear anyone claim that we'll be spending more in social security then we're taking in by 2014 (I think that's date), I want to ask them "So if you don't think the government's going to honor the social security trust fund, are you advocating a cut in payroll taxes so we can stop stiffing all the people who make less than $95,000?"

[Perfect Competition]

"...the rising cost of health care..."

If regulation mediated perfect competition lowers costs, we must have the opposite.

[Brooks]

Yes, it is stupid or deliberately misleading for anyone to focus particularly on SS rather than on entitlements as a whole, and indeed on all projected spending vs. projected revenues at current levels of taxation. And yes, Medicare is what will grow the most, and what will become the largest part of the budget. But SS will also grow very substantially and will also become an even larger part of the budget than it already is. And it is INCORRECT to say "Social Security payroll taxes were raised, creating a surplus in the trust fund that would fully cover the future costs of baby-boomer retirement." The "trust fund" would only fully cover a few years of SS benefits at current SS spending levels. It is only by combining the "trust fund" with ongoing SS FICA taxation that "solvency" is achieved for a few decades (or as some here contend, far beyond a few decades). And there's the rub. The same (roughly two) generations of workers who will be taxed to pay for ongoing discretionary spending, plus mandated healthcare and income support for the poor, plus interest on our mounting debt, will also have to pay for massive healthcare costs for retirees AND...Social Security. It is entirely legitimate for us to ask -- to ASK -- if protecting every last cent for every last retiree is a higher priority than everything that would have to be sacrificed to preserve that policy, as opposed to, say, means-testing so that the working poor or middle class don't end up hurt in one way or another (higher payroll tax or lower employment or lower wages/salaries) so that Bill Gates can get a SS check.

[Brooks]

Piglet,

To answer your questions:

"Gross National Debt" includes the Trust Fund debt. "Debt Held by the Public" (or "Publicly Held Debt") does not.

I think usually the figure cited as the annual deficit as a % of GDP is net of the SS surplus (i.e., after the surplus covers part of the operating deficit of the rest of the budget), which is the "unified deficit", as opposed to the "on-budget deficit" that does not take into account the SS surplus.

FYI http://voxbaby.blogspot.com/2006/09/which-budget-deficit-to-target.html

[pgl]

When I noted that Glenn Beck should read both Andrew Samwick and Paul Krugman - the very well informed Bruce Webb hammered me for praising Andrew. OK, Andrew is pushing for a slightly bigger reduction in benefits than Paul and I would but at least Andrew is not calling for privatization based on the incessant bad "analyzes" offerred by the likes of Beck.

[anne]

"OK, Andrew is pushing for a slightly bigger reduction in benefits than Paul...."

This is a lie, a shameful lie.

Andrew Samwick wishes to destroy Social Security, and to compare Paul Krugman who wishes only to preserve Social Security with Samwick is a completely shameful lie.

[anne]

There is no problem with Social Security and only a need to protect Social Security as is from the fiends who would prefer the death and destruction of war and occupation to caring for our grandparents and parents. Social Security is our right, the right of my grandmother and the right of my mother.

Enough lying; Social Security will not be cut.

[anne]

Paul Krugman wishes only to protect Social Security. Enough shameful lying. Stop the war and occupation, and stop trying to destroy our civil rights.

[Brooks]

anne,

Re: "Andrew Samwick wishes to destroy Social Security"

If you can substantiate that charge, please do, with link(s) to statements by Andrew that you think are probative. And if you can't substantiate that charge, you shouldn't make it. Or do you define "destroy" so broadly as to render it meaningless (e.g., ANY reduction in benefits or eligibility)?

[anne]

Andrew Samwick wishes to destroy Social Security; which is precisely what the proposals by Samwick to slash and bash Social Security while pretending not to do so are about.

Republican Samwick happily found a supposed Democrat who would go along with saving Social Security by smashing Social Security, when no saving was possibly needed. There is a massive and growing Social Security surplus, and no problem at all, but Social Security fiends only care to undermine the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and nolthing else matters; no grandparetns, not paretns, not war, not occupation. Such are the modern nihilists.

[anne]

http://voxbaby.blogspot.com/2005/12/nonpartisan-social-security-reform.html

The partisan non-partisan Andrew Samwick let us all destroy Social Security while pretending to save Social Security which needs no saving plan. Amen.

[Brooks]

anne,

As I expected, you use the term "destroy" quite loosely, to say the least (to say the most, it's unfair, misleading hyperbole). I guess that's just the style in which you like to express yourself.

[anne]

Andrew Samwick wishes to destroy Social Security; which is precisely what the proposals by Samwick to cut Social Security benefits while pretending not to do so and while raising Social Security taxes are about.

There is a certain sort of fiend who would prefer that the har won civil rights of our grandparents and parents be given over. Me, I want more.

[RN]

Brooks,

Welcome to the comment diarrhea which is "anne".

[anne]

Notice the language and thinking of the gutter; notice the vicious attempt at intimidation; notice how intimiated I am.

[Patricia Shannon]

Anne, you sound like you're 90 years old.

[Brooks]

anne,

Being passionate about causes is fine, and often good. I'm just suggesting that you to try to be fair to people. Don't be so quick to assume someone is a "fiend" and to describe him and his views accordingly. Well-meaning people can have honest disagreements.

[Patricia Shannon]

If we consider some people to have immoral beliefs and actions, it does not follow that the moral thing is to be the exact opposite in all ways. That's just laziness.

[me]

I think we should continue to run government successfully like our first MBA president. Companies have stolen pensions from employees so why not the government? Just cancel social security, period, we can't afford it anymore. Profit is more important at any cost. IBM stopped their pension plan this January. We can replace it with a 401K plan. Oh yeah, the present value of what you have paid into social security is low balled like say IBM. We will start you account with say, $35,000.

Gerstner built a mansion on Martha's Vineyard with the IBM pension fund and he is a hero while IBM retirees owe the company more per month for their company paid health care (hint, not anymore) than their pension.

Why not turn the government into heroes like our corporate thieves? Of course Palmisanno shows up at an employees meeting with 6 body guards. Myabe he has trouoble convincing employees why he needs a $10,000 a day pension and they need none.

[piglet]

"I think usually the figure cited as the annual deficit as a % of GDP is net of the SS surplus (i.e., after the surplus covers part of the operating deficit of the rest of the budget), which is the "unified deficit", as opposed to the "on-budget deficit" that does not take into account the SS surplus."

That means the books are cooked, right? The trust fund surplus should be kept separate from the operating budget. What is the real deficit, then? This is significant since we are always being told that the deficit is not that big, it's not really a problem. I recently heard Robert Reich say that. It is of course a double lie to claim the deficit (that is mainly generated by the military) isn't really a problem but Social Security *is* a problem, since SS only ever becomes a problem because it is being plundered to finance war.

[Bruce Webb]

Oh my such little time.
Bakho: "The 1983 SS plan was a huge increase in payroll taxes that partly offset the Reagan tax cuts for the wealthy. It amounted to a tax shift from the wealthy to working class."

Bakho generally I have your back but on this one I have to cry bullshit. Under the law Social Security is supposed to maintain a minimum of one year in reserves to buffer out short term changes in employment and hence receipts from FICA. That reserve is expressed as a function of time with 1 year equalling 100. An inspection of the relevant tables show that Reagan inherited a Social Security system with a balance of $26 billion and a Trust Fund Ratio of 25. By the time of the 1983 reform that balance and ratio had both gone to zero and only some fancy borrowing between OAS, DI and HI Trust Funds kept us out of actual negative territory. The reforms started putting Social Security back on the path to Short Term Actuarial Balance (defined as a projected TF Ratio of 100 in each of the next ten years) but by 1988 the balance was only up to $41 billion with a TF ratio of 41. For all of Reagan's faults on the finance side this is one of the ones he actually got right. We did not finance tax cuts for the rich or Star Wars from $41 billion over the five year period from 1983 to 1988. The entire 'looting' narrative is part and parcel of the Economic Right's larger 'phony IOU' story. They set a trap and too many of the Left fell into it. Johnson did not loot Social Security to pay for Vietnam or the Great Society, Reagan didn't loot Social Security to pay for Star Wars mainly because when you look at the actual numbers there wasn't much to loot.
Table VI.A4.—Historical Operations of the Combined OASI and DI Trust Funds, Calendar Years 1957-2007 [Amounts in billions]

[Brooks]

piglet,

Which is the "real" deficit depends on what question you are trying to answer. But yes, from a standpoint of fiscal responsibility, focusing on just the "unified deficit" is irresponsible since it does, to use your term, "cook the books" by letting the SS surplus cover some of the on-budget deficit, knowing that the surplus represents a future liability.

As for whether or not today's deficits are a problem, context is very important, and that context is our current debt-to-GDP ratio combined with our projected (unfunded liability) expenses under current policies. Entitlement costs (Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security) are projected to grow enormously over the next few decades as a % of GDP. Our current fiscal course is unsustainable, meaning that under current tax spending policies, our federal government would go bankrupt. See http://www.heritage.org/research/features/budgetchartbook/fed-rev-spend-2008-boc-P6-Entitlement-Reforms-are-Needed-to.html We should have been running surpluses rather than deficits over the past couple of decades and should be doing so today (or at least balancing budgets so that as GDP grows our debt-to-GDP declines).

So yeah, I think deficits are a problem.

Regards to Pooh, Tigger, Roo and Eeyore.

[Bruce Webb]

Time I guess for a rousing round of 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' because here it comes again.

pgl "OK, Andrew is pushing for a slightly bigger reduction in benefits than Paul and I would but at least Andrew is not calling for privatization based on the incessant bad "analyzes" offerred by the likes of Beck."

Well accept that he is. Samwick consistently starts with the thoroughly bogus Infinite Future Horizon numbers introduced with the 2003 Report, the very ones that produce Beck's $53 billion asteroid. He does this because his signature Liebman-MacGuineas-Samwick Non Partisan Social Security Reform Plan does not survive encounter with the numbers of the standard 75 year actuarial window. Using Infinite Future allows Samwick to start with the claim that the payroll gap is 3.2% instead of the 1.7% just reported in the 2008 Report (in fairness it was 1.92% when LMS was drafted.

LMS proposes a 5.2% wage worker financed solution to a problem now priced at 1.7% and doesn't actual solve the problem. In doing so he uses a bait and switch strategy that redefines 'solvency' from 'able to pay 100% of scheduled benefits' to something much different. The LMS plan is only nine pages and worth reading but could be summarized in a sentence. 'Screw over workers so as to minimize the demands on capital to repay the money they borrowed from Social Security since 1993' (when SS first hit a 100 Trust Fund ratio).

[Brooks]

typo: "under current tax spending policies" should be "under current tax AND spending policies"

[Bruce Webb]

Brooks "Re: "Andrew Samwick wishes to destroy Social Security"

If you can substantiate that charge, please do, with link(s) to statements by Andrew that you think are probative."

Brooks have you read through the LMS plan? Can you explain why it would make sense for any current worker? Have you read through the Social Security archive at Samwick's website?
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/jeffreyliebman/lms_nonpartisan_plan_description.pdf
http://voxbaby.blogspot.com/2004/12/social-security-archive.html
http://voxbaby.blogspot.com/2005/05/social-security-archive-part-ii.html

Well I have. Samwick is proposing a horribly worker unfriendly system of PRAs (Personal Retirement Accounts) at a cost of 3x what it would take to fully fund Social Security under Intermediate Cost assumptions while hiding his own economic assumptions. His plan makes no sense at all except as an ideological attempt to gut the concept of social responsibility to social problems, which is to say roll back the New Deal.

I generally wouldn't phrase things in the ways that Anne does, but her sense of hearing is acute. A lot of language on this and related issues is pitched in dog whistle level, you are not meant to hear the signal to the faithful. Well some of us are tuned in and we don't like what we hear.

[Bruce Webb]

The LMS link didn't render right on my browser and got truncated. So here it is tagged.
Liebaman-MacGuineas-Samwick Non Partisan Social Security Reform Plan

[Brooks]

Bruce,

I challenged her to substantiate the charge because it didn't seem to fit what I've seen and heard from Andrew. She pointed me to Andrew's summary of his plan. I'll paste an excerpt below this paragraph. I am not nearly as well-versed in the details and technical aspects of SS as you are, so I can't assess the validity of his assumptions, calculations, etc. or even the desirability of his plan, nor can I respond to your criticisms of his plan. But it does seem like an overstatement for anne to describe his plan as devious attempt by a "fiend" to "destroy" SS, and for you describe it as simply "an ideological attempt to gut the concept of social responsibility to social problems" presented in a sneaky, deliberately misleading manner, and knowingly with invalid numbers, to conceal his supposed true objectives. And in my email correspondence with Andrew he has never struck me as some far-right extremist ideologue. I think you and anne are (1) attacking the man's sincerity without sufficient justification, and (2) engaging in hyperbole to describe his plan because you don't like it. And I would have that impression even if I had never been on the receiving end of unfair, presumptuous charges of the same nature from both of you. I'm not saying there aren't folks out there who are disingenuous in pursuit of a hidden agenda, but as they say, even paranoids sometimes have real enemies.

BELOW IS FROM ANDREW SAMWICKS BLOG, THE PAGE TO WHICH ANNE LINKED:

The plan contains four primary elements: a gradual reduction in future benefits; an increase in the payroll tax cap; an increase in the retirement age; and the establishment of personal retirement accounts. The plan puts great emphasis on fiscal responsibility – there are no transfers from general revenues to achieve sustainable solvency. Specifically:

1) Pay-as-you-go benefits would be gradually reduced to keep the costs of the traditional system to what can be afforded by the 12.4 percent payroll tax. The cuts are structured such that cuts are larger for high earners than for low earners.

2) The plan would establish mandatory personal retirement accounts (PRA) in the amount of 3 percent of taxable payroll. The accounts would be funded by a combination of diverting 1.5 percent of taxable payroll from the Social Security trust fund and requiring workers to contribute an additional 1.5 percent of payroll into their PRAs.

3) The funds diverted from the trust fund would be replaced, once the Social Security surplus was not adequate, by raising the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax so that 90 percent of earnings were taxed. Workers would receive no incremental benefits for paying these additional taxes.

4) The plan would gradually increase the normal retirement age (currently scheduled to reach 67 in 2017) to 68 and the earliest age at which retirees could collect Social Security benefits from its current 62 to 65. People would be able to tap into their PRA assets beginning at age 62.

5) In order to minimize risks and administrative costs, accounts would be tightly regulated and full annuitization of account balances would be required.

6) Total replacement rates from the remaining traditional benefits and the new PRAs are comparable for most workers to those promised but currently underfunded in present law.

[ma258zda]

c487t

[atompsett65]

The government needs to quit acting like ss is their money, ss belongs to retired baby boomers, and as far as im concerned, "borrowing" money from ss is the same as stealing it, when they raise ss taxes to bring ss back into check, they are just going to borrow more money from it, it goes in a circle. If a non-profitable organization "borrowed" from the money they raised, than they would go to jail, what the government is doing with ss in my opinion is the same thing, so why are the people responsible for this "borrowing" or theft, in jail? It just makes no sense to me, they think they are above the law, and they are in a way, I think something needs to be done, not fast, not soon, NOW

SS is just a piece of what America's messed up economy is made out of, we send about 2 billion dollars a day over seas to foreign countries, we over consume, and build up credit, we spend money we don't have.

53 Trillion dollars? does anyone know what comes after a trillion, because I don't, and we're already half way there.

every american would have to pay 30,000 just to get our government out of debt, when its not even the public's fault.

It is our constitutional right, to reform our government if we see fit that it needs to be done, and if that time isn't now, and changes are not made, than that time will be within the next 50 years. America's economy is so messed up in so many places, that I wouldn't even know where to start.

Sorry I had to get that off my chest.

[D]

Of course it's the public's fault - we elect the idiots who make these decisions then refuse to change them.

The sooner "we" (the public) realize we are personally responsible for what happens in the world due to the political, economic and consumptive choices we make (be that deficits, gas prices, education standards, health care, etc, etc) the sooner we will be in a position to get out of the hole.

Until then stop whining and do something to be part of the solution.

says...

Ugh it would have to be over 500 trillion to be "over half way" to a quadrillion

says...

I wish the public wasn't so stupid--politicians would like to offer solutions to this upcoming problem, but as soon as they even mention lowering the retirement age or raising taxes, people go ballistic and vote for the other guy. This leaves politicians avoiding all questions they get regarding any controversial issues.

says...

raising the retirement age, that is.

says...

Oh no, not the 53T discussion again...

Looking at the Wolf Blitzer picture, forgive me the racial overtones, but is the "2004" covering the Pacific Ocean? The way our respective bailouts are going, he might have a point...

And anne, bruce,
Are you looking for deviousness where there is only simple (in both senses of the word) reliance on meaningless projections?

[Julio]

That was me.

[Beezer]

"The sooner "we" (the public) realize we are personally responsible for what happens in the world due to the political, economic and consumptive choices we make (be that deficits, gas prices, education standards, health care, etc, etc) the sooner we will be in a position to get out of the hole." D writes.

Macro's always had difficulty talking to Micro. That's because Micro never (well hardly ever) thinks much about Macro. Recessions, or worse, are events that tend to get Micro's attention. Times like now. Despite the difficulties, these times present great opportunity for both to listen to each other.

Both got together to elect Obama. It's a rare event this one. Better get some of those "big ideas" out there now because, as soon as micro begins to feel comfortable again, the conversation will end.