Boston University professor of economics says DC is doing budget theater.

According to Lawrence Kotlikoff, Washington DC is wasting time and politicians might as well just go home for all the good they are doing with their budget "planning".  After 6 decades of running a Ponzi scheme (his words), it's all coming home to roost.  He claims the government is engaging in Enron style accounting with off balance sheet items that make the whole country bankrupt.

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/enron-accounting-d.c.-politicians-%22just-wasting-time%22-on-budget-bu's-kotlikoff-says-536041.html?tickers=%5EDJI,%5EGSPC,TBT,TLT,XLV,GLD,TIP

I wish he was just crazy but well over 4 years of study of this situation has led me to all of these exact conclusions (and I have been outspoken about it the whole time).  I was calling it a Ponzi when Ponzi wasn't cool.  Face it, dem=GOP=con men and most Americans have been willing patsies in the generational kleptoparasitism scam.  It's now just so obvious that even people from academia (academia has been the marketing arm of the Ponzi for decades now) are being vocal and cutting all the fake political correctness and fifty cent words out of their interviews (which is pretty much what I predicted would happen as well).

So at this point we are all an economic version of Charlie Sheen.  We are drunk and disorderly and out of control.  We are completely addicted to debt as a nation.  Half the people are still shouting "winning" when what we really need is massive rehab.  None of the bailouts were actually bailouts.   They were all can kicking exercises to give bankers more opportunity to fleece us.  Nothing has been fixed and at this point you have to be pretty childish not to have figured it out.  Sorry in advance if that applies to you, kudos to you if it doesn't.

So if it is all going to Hell in a hand basket then why not just ride it in like Slim Pickens did in Dr. Strangelove?  Why bother shutting the Ponzi down now?  Just ride it for all it's worth and deal with it when it dies on its own.  Well the problem with this is that the Ponzi collapse will likely wait until the thick part of the boomers are trying to draw benefits from the system.  The very act of attempted collection by too many patsies will collapse the system.  That's how Ponzis always collapse; the outflows exceed the inflows.

If we know there is a huge problem now, why would we wait until our population gets old and feeble before telling them to come up with another retirement plan?  Why would we not give people as much advance warning to make new plans, push out retirement, etc. as we can so that they are impacted the least?  Failure to do this is mean spirited and evil.  These people will be old and incapable of working to generate more value and many of them will be counting on fairy tale Wimpy Promises.  Many will be thrown into the streets where they won't have much of a chance.  What should we do, just push them all into a hole with a bulldozer?  Is this really what we want to do?  Really??  Also, young people are getting screwed in this deal right now.  Do we really want to continue stealing their future with our dishonest debt scam?

The phony liberal do gooders and the phony right wing philanthropists (often a self serving strategy believe it or not) out themselves as con men or willing patsies (there is little difference at some point) when they will not sacrifice anything today in order to make sure that young people and old people don't get screwed.  We need to balance the budget (and take the depression that that will cause), get rid of the federal reserve and return to honest money, and then create a debt work out with our creditors (no, they should not get off scot free because they should have known better than to keep on lending like that).  We need to slash military spending and we need to rethink how we are going to provide for the care of our elderly.  We need to do this now because the bulk of the boomers will be in retirement within a decade and the Ponzi will collapse with a loud splat at that point if we haven't shut it down in a more controlled fashion before then.