New President, Same Danger 回复：刘伯松来稿：奥巴马可能败选

无论谁当选，危机依在，而且越演越烈。现在的修补性救市措施无济于事。下面的英文文字可能长了点。不过记住，现在的问题比大家所感受和了解的到的大的大的大的多。。。1929-1933 危机实际上拖了近10年才完。美国今天的衰败岂止在华尔街。。。。。

$810 billion is a lot of money.
That's $700 billion for the bailout... plus $110 billion more of "sweeteners" that got tacked on.

And how much of it do you think you'll see? Not a dime. Nor will your children... or you grandchildren... or even their children.

It's not for us, even though it's our money they're spending.

Every penny is going to the banks... the business owners... the over-stretched lenders... the special interests... basically everybody who helped create this crisis in the first place.

In fact, and this is going to surprise you...

Simply because there's something much bigger... much more dangerous to you and your money... and much more serious than anybody in Washington or Wall Street wants you to realize...

Even what Alan Greenpan calls our "once in a century 'Credit Tsunami'" is nothing by comparison. And this much larger, little talked about calamity is heading straight for you.

Right now, as you read these words.
In fact, it's a four-pronged financial catastrophe, headed for all of us here in America.

Here's the crazy part — not one of today's White House staffers, Congressional elite, or political candidates want to even TOUCH on this terrifying future event... not with a 20-foot pole.

Even though, short of a terrorist with a nuke in downtown Manhattan...
There is no greater threat to you, your money, or this nation than the one I'm about to lay out for you in detail in the letter below.

The fact is, America is in deep, deep trouble. Much deeper than anyone is willing to tell you.

On October 23, Alan Greenspan called today's market wipeouts the cause of a "credit tsunami." But even this that we're seeing is modest compared to what lies in waiting, especially if we don't do something now to avoid it.

At the dawn of the 21st century the U.S. had $5.7 trillion in total debt. As we approach the end of George W. Bush's presidency only eight years later, that sum has nearly doubled, thanks to war costs, tax cuts, spending increases, expanded entitlement programs, and now a welter of government bailouts and rescues.

This year was particularly bad. The federal budget deficit for fiscal 2008 hit $455 billion, up from $162 billion last year. That figure does not include the cost of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which has an initial pricetag in the hundreds of billions of dollars. In fairness, some of that money presumably will come back to the Treasury, since the new rescue-related sums will be used to acquire preferred stock, mortgages, and other assets that someday could be sold at a profit.
Yet any such calculations are penny ante compared with the fiscal disaster that is bearing down on America. It's no longer an event in the misty future. It officially began earlier this year when teacher Kathleen Casey-Kirschling of Maryland became the first baby-boom retiree to collect Social Security benefits. She will be followed by about 78 million more boomers over the next 17 years.

The entitlements due from Social Security and Medicare present us with that frightening abyss. The costs of these current programs, along with other health-care costs, could bankrupt our country. The abyss offers no assets, troubled or otherwise, to help us cross it.

Yes, some have suggested less-than-revolutionary measures that could help. Among them: budget savings that would accrue from repealing the Bush-era tax cuts, ending the Iraq war, or expanding the economy after the current downturn runs its course. But even if the economy were to grow at the level of 3.2% a year, as it did in the 1990s, and these other savings were achieved, they wouldn't come close to addressing our federal financial problem.

Nor can we be complacent about timing. The costs of these programs start to threaten our solvency in the next several years. The only way to get across the chasm is to begin making tough choices now to change our current course. Delay will make the problem worse.

In fact, the deteriorating financial condition of our federal government in the face of skyrocketing health-care costs and the baby-boom retirement could fairly be described as a super-subprime crisis. It would certainly dwarf what we're seeing now.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), noting that the federal balance sheet does not reflect the government's huge unfunded promises in our nation's social-insurance programs, estimated last year that the unfunded obligations for Medicare and Social Security alone totaled almost $41 trillion. That sum, equivalent to $352,000 per U.S. household, is the present-value shortfall between the growing cost of entitlements and the dedicated revenues intended to pay for them over the next 75 years.

Why call it a super-subprime crisis? Besides its gigantic scale, there are very disturbing similarities between the current mortgage-related crisis and our next potential disaster.

First, like the securitized investment vehicles that blew up, federal programs were launched without adequately thinking through who would bear the ultimate cost and related risk. Just as originators of mortgages let themselves off the hook by unloading packages of dubious loans onto others, lawmakers have increased spending, expanded entitlement programs, and cut taxes while expecting future generations to pay the bill.

Second, just as a lack of transparency associated with mortgage-backed securities resulted in big surprises and large losses for investors, our nation's huge off-balance-sheet obligations for Social Security and Medicare present a threat wrapped in camouflage. After all, the government's "trust funds" don't really provide much security since they don't hold anything but more government debt.

Third, in the same way that private sector "risk management" executives failed to prevent the subprime mortgage crisis, overseers in Congress and the executive branch have turned a blind eye to costs associated with entitlement programs and tax cuts. While lax regulation of banks fed the current subprime crisis, a lack of statutory budget controls has led to a widening gap between the government's revenues and costs.

At the heart of these problems is our leaders' collective failure to act in the face of known challenges. Our country has veered from its founding principles, which held to individual responsibility and accountability today in order to create more opportunity tomorrow. When our constitution was written, the concepts of thrift and prudence were no less at the center of the American spirit than liberty and justice.