Deficit focus - do the math

“Debt and deficits are not inventions of ideology. They are facts of arithmetic.”

– Paul Martin, Canada’s finance minister at the start of the country’s “Redemptive Decade”

taken from John Mauldin's Outside the Box e-letter

One of the most important lessons is that long-term structural deficits are not about politics but just a math problem that only has one solution. Benefits will have to be cut. You cannot make the number balance if there is no economic growth. You cannot make the numbers balance is the growth of transfers and government expenditures continue at a rate higher than the growth of the overall economy.