Recent economic commentary has been filled with "D" words: deficits, debt, deflation, depreciation. Deficits--budget and trade--are of the greatest concern and may be on an unsustainable course, as federal and national debt grow without limit. The United States is already the world's largest...

Growing government budget surpluses combined with growing trade deficits have generated record private sector deficits. Unless households continue to reduce their saving--creating an increasingly unsustainable debt burden--the impetus that has driven the expansion will evaporate.

Anyone who reads a newspaper knows that most Americans have accumulated excessive levels of debt, and realizes that as interest rates climb, it becomes more difficult to service financial liabilities. To add insult to injury, wage growth has been slow, while prices--especially for energy--have...

A federal government surplus has finally been achieved, and it has been met with pronouncements that it is a great gift for the future and with arguments about what to do with it. However, the surplus will be short-lived, it will depress economic growth, and, in any case, surpluses cannot be...

For seven decades, the far right has never veered from its avowed mission to gut America's most comprehensive, successful, and popular safety net: Social Security. While it had won a few small battles (most notably, the Greenspan Commission's huge 1983 payroll tax hikes and two-year increase in...

The search for the solution to the problems faced by the Social Security system should focus not on how to amend OASDI but on how best to achieve faster long-term economic growth. Achieving such growth is better left to the purview of fiscal and monetary policy, not the OASDI system.

It is now widely recognized that economists and policymakers alike had been living a 30-year fantasy. The best government is not that which governs least. The best economy is not that which is abandoned to the invisible fist of the unconstrained market. Our national and individual security is...

Unlike the Papa, Mama, and Baby Bears faced by the storybook Goldilocks, our Goldilocks faced three ferocious grizzlies: a cascading, global financial crisis; global deflation and excess capacity (or insufficient demand); and a domestic fiscal surplus in conjunction with record private deficits.

Demographers and economists agree that we are aging--individually and collectively, nationally and globally. An aging population results from the twin demographic forces of fewer children per family and longer lives. Most experts recognize the burden that aging causes as the number of retirees...

If you were to write yourself IOUs to provide for your retirement and put them in a safety deposit box, would you rest comfortably, assured that you would be able to purchase all the necessities of life in 2020? Well, President Clinton's is even worse.