Another warning that a national debt crisis is looming

By Philip Klein | July 17, 2014

It's no longer popular in Washington these days to discuss the nation's long-term debt problem, but a report released on Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office provided a stark reminder that a looming crisis is approaching, and the longer the nation waits to address it, the more difficult it will be to avert.

In the immediate term, with the economy doing better than it had been, annual deficits have shrunk substantially from where they were in the beginning of this decade. But this trend, the CBO has projected, will be short-lived, and deficits will soon be on the rise again, pushing the debt to unsustainable levels.

CBO identified the primary drivers of the rising debt to be the aging of the population and rising health care spending, a trend that was accelerated by President Obama's health care law due to the increase in Medicaid spending and subsidies for individuals to purchase insurance on government-run exchanges. In addition, CBO anticipates that interest rates will rise from their currently low levels, further adding to the debt......To Read More......