A good place to begin to try and understand the federal government’s finances is a report issued by an obscure federal agency known as Financial Management Services.

More often than not, the great public policy issues of our time are complex and the solutions not easy. In a world where the public is hungry for easy answers and the 24-hour media all too eager to provide them, I have tried to swim against the tide. I have asked my readers to lay aside preconceived notions and think harder about the issues facing

This has been the result of a

Obsession over “end times” is nothing new. Most cultures have as part of their belief system some ultimate fate of the human race, with most foreseeing a calamitous end. The beliefs are so widely held that we have a word for such systems: eschatology.

Beginning in the 1980s, for reasons I have not been able to completely divine, we took a sharp turn away from practicality and toward ideology. The partisan divide gradually became a chasm, compromise a dirty word. Increasingly our political debate has devolved into sound bites and slogans as the two major political parties’ platforms have ignored

Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population

Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum in their book That Used to Be Us describe the Democrats’ and Republicans’ “war on math,” noting that both sides ignore irrefutable financial realities. It is an apt description of the state of our politics today.

combination of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a new Medicare prescription benefit, the effects of the recession and the Obama administration’s stimulus spending and tax cuts early in his administration.

When you add a 5 percent increase in expenses to a 3 percent decrease in revenues to a historic 2