Do you think USA can be saved? the game is up! http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print...en-know-commentary-by-laurence-kotlikoff.html U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It: Laurence Kotlikoff By Laurence Kotlikoff - Aug 10, 2010 Bloomberg Opinion (Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University and author of âJimmy Stewart Is Dead: Ending the Worldâs Ongoing Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking.â The opinions expressed are his own.) Letâs get real. The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills. delve deeper, and you will find that the IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: âThe U.S. fiscal gap associated with todayâs federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.â It adds that âclosing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.â Double Our Taxes To put 14 percent of gross domestic product in perspective, current federal revenue totals 14.9 percent of GDP. So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act. Such a tax hike would leave the U.S. running a surplus equal to 5 percent of GDP this year, rather than a 9 percent deficit. So the IMF is really saying the U.S. needs to run a huge surplus now and for many years to come to pay for the spending that is scheduled. Itâs also saying the longer the country waits to make tough fiscal adjustments, the more painful they will be. Is the IMF bonkers? No. It has done its homework. So has the Congressional Budget Office whose Long-Term Budget Outlook, released in June, shows an even larger problem. âUnofficialâ Liabilities Based on the CBOâs data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt. This gargantuan discrepancy between our âofficialâ debt and our actual net indebtedness isnât surprising. It reflects what economists call the labeling problem. Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities âunofficialâ to keep them off the books and far in the future. This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck. Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under U.S. President Richard Nixon, coined an oft-repeated phrase: âSomething that canât go on, will stop.â True enough. Uncle Samâs Ponzi scheme will stop. But it will stop too late. And it will stop in a very nasty manner. The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited on the baby boomers in retirement. The second is astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save. And the third is the government simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills. Worse Than Greece Most likely we will see a combination of all three responses with dramatic increases in poverty, tax, interest rates and consumer prices. This is an awful, downhill road to follow, but itâs the one we are on. And bond traders will kick us miles down our road once they wake up and realize the U.S. is in worse fiscal shape than Greece. Some doctrinaire Keynesian economists would say any stimulus over the next few years wonât affect our ability to deal with deficits in the long run. This is wrong as a simple matter of arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the governmentâs credit-card bill and each yearâs 14 percent of GDP is the interest on that bill. If it doesnât pay this yearâs interest, it will be added to the balance. Demand-siders say forgoing this yearâs 14 percent fiscal tightening, and spending even more, will pay for itself, in present value, by expanding the economy and tax revenue. My reaction? Get real, or go hang out with equally deluded supply-siders. Our country is broke and can no longer afford no- pain, all-gain âsolutions.â