tax revenues

     I agree that Eugene Steuerle's "Fiscal Democracy Index offers a chilling new perspective on the declining state of federal finances.  Like Andrew Samwick, I too hadn't realized that 2009 was the first year in which all Federal revenues were consumed by promises made in the past -- entitlement programs and interest on the debt. All discretionary programs, the ones that Congress has to vote to fund each year, were paid with borrowed money.

    Here are some other factoids that I only recently learned, courtesy of Fitch Ratings (see attachment at bottom of this post), which warned earlier this month that the United States' AAA rating could be at risk if don't make some sort of fiscal headway in the next three to five years.

     Point One:  We often hear that the US government debt load is  lower as a share of GDP than those of many other large, wealthy nations, including Japan, Germany, the UK and France. But a more apples-to-apples comparison, which combines federal, state and local government borrowing, suggests that the US is in worse shape than most other AAA-rated countries.