Bowles: 'We Face The Most Predictable Economic Crisis In History'

The warnings keep coming but the political/media establishment ignores it. Meanwhile we're just talking about a meaningless election in where there is really no mention of what needs to be done to rescue the current economy:

 Erskine Bowles, a true Southern gentleman and co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s erstwhile budget-deficit commission, came to New York City from his home in North Carolina the other night to talk sense about the nation’s perilous fiscal condition.

“I think today we face the most predictable economic crisis in history,” he told an audience on April 24 at the Council on Foreign Relations -- an audience that might actually be able to help do something about the problem. “Fortunately, I think it’s also the most avoidable. I think it’s clear, if you do simple arithmetic, that the fiscal path that the nation is on is simply not sustainable.”

Bowles, a Democrat, then laid on the crowd some pretty simple, but devastating, arithmetic. He explained that 100 percent of the tax revenue that entered the Treasury in 2011 went out the door to pay for mandatory spending -- such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- and to pay the interest on our staggering $15.6 trillion national debt.

That means that every single dollar we spent on everything else, including two wars, national defense, homeland security, education, infrastructure, high-value-added research and the like, was borrowed. “And,” he warned, “half of it was borrowed from foreign countries. And that is a formula for failure in anybody’s book.”

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