I didn't know that "people die". Are you sure about that?
Of course, I don't plan on dying myself, but that's what I hear about all the rest--. <GGG>
Sorry if I took what you intended to be a fairly straightforward point and made an overblown issue of it. I see your point about the raw population numbers. I guess it could be seen as surprising, given how much press the Boomer "time bomb" has received over the years.
Tax hikes are always a bummer, of course, but all in all we fared pretty well in the 1980s, running up the Federal debt from $0.8451 trillion on 31 December 1979 to $2.8574 trillion on 29 September 1989. $2 trillion is quite a bit of "free" money that the politicians in the 1980s are never going to be accountable for. Reagan, Bush, Democratic-controlled Congress: the whole lot of them. Not that it's really "free" in the end, of course, as we'll learn when the markets stop playing the "rollover" game with our publicly held debt. The mid-2010s could be the time when the music stops: if we're in deficit on the core budget, we'll be borrowing for that, and in addition the government will have to borrow from the public to redeem U.S. Treasuries that are held by the Social Security Trust and various other government trust funds -- so we'll be asking the financial markets not only to support operating overdrafts, but also to cover debt that the government owes itself through the system of "intragovernmental transfers" that has proliferated during the past couple of decades.
As of 11 September 2002, the Federal debt stood at $6,212,731,396,360.16.
Well, I certainly didn't mean to launch into a rant, but I appreciated learning a bit about where you were coming from and now have gone on a bit too much in showing where I'm coming from.
Thanks for making me think, too; I always enjoy these kinds of macro discussions.
Lane
AI
Market Data 
Markets 
