The U.S. is going broke.

Published in Federal Reserve Bank of ST. Louis July/August 2006 by Laurence J. Kotlikoff.

CONCLUSION:

There are 77 million baby boomers now rang-
ing from age 41 to age 59. All are hoping to collect
tens of thousands of dollars in pension and health-
care benefits from the next generation. These
claimants aren’t going away. In three years, the
oldest boomers will be eligible for early Social
Security benefits. In six years, the boomer van-
guard will start collecting Medicare. Our nation
has done nothing to prepare for this onslaught of
obligation. Instead, it has continued to focus on
a completely meaningless fiscal metric—“the”
federal deficit—censored and studiously ignored
long-term fiscal analyses that are scientifically
coherent, and dramatically expanded the benefit
levels being explicitly or implicitly promised to
the baby boomers.
Countries can and do go bankrupt. The United
States, with its $65.9 trillion fiscal gap, seems
clearly headed down that path. The country needs
to stop shooting itself in the foot. It needs to adopt
generational accounting as its standard method
of budgeting and fiscal analysis, and it needs to
adopt fundamental tax, Social Security, and
healthcare reforms that will redeem our children’s
future.

US Going Broke