Another option is cut back on government programs we derive benefits from (note the word “we” – not just programs other people derive benefits from). It would be a tremendous hidush if this happened.

The third option is the US goes broke (similar to the PIIGS today, or Germany in the 1923, but much worse since the US is the world’s sole economic superpower).

If I was offering on, I bet on the worse case scenario, and hope to be pleasantly surprised. Americans are infamous for opposing taxes while favoring benefits.

The Ryan plan also makes completely unrealistic assumptions about what it will be able to accomplish in terms of Medicare cuts. The $15k voucher will be about a 25% cut in medicare expenditures. Except that since these will be private insurers with a minimum of five times the administrative overhead of Medicare, it really is about a 33% cut. Further, the $15k is not indexed to health care inflation, which has been running 7% annually, but to the overall CPI, which hasn’t been increasing much. So within a few years we are talking about a 50% cut. Furthermore, the private insurers can decide what people to let die, er, uh, what conditions not to cover. God help anyone on kidney dialysis, except that Congress will respond to the screams, double the voucher amount, and enact legislation to require coverage of all these expensive conditions. As a result, all the savings vanish and now you also have to pay for all the administrative overhead, seven figure executive compensation, and shareholder profits of the private insurers. If you don’t believe me, look at what has happened to the reduction in reimbursement to providers that was enacted under Clinton: The much smaller amount of pressure from physicians has prevented it from ever taking effect.

Why anyone would want to replace the most popular and efficient health insurer in America with private insurers, the best of whom have five times the administrative overhead, is beyond me — unless your real goal is to create a corporate welfare program. Given that Ryan voted for the Bush prescription drug plan (which wasn’t even funded), I suspect that is the case.

Most uninformed discussions of the US government’s debt, including the one in this article, start off by exclaiming that the debt is, holy schamoly, wowwie zowwie, yikey schnikies, OMG really really really really really really big. But they don’t say big compared to what. They don’t know how to put the US government’s debt into perspective. Economists and financiers would ask about the size of the US economy, the present state of the US economy, prospects for future economic growth, current tax levels and many other things (I’m not an economist or financier, so the foregoing list is not exhaustive) before declaring it “big.” If the US government debt does present a long-term problem – which it might, if it is not properly managed over the long term – then it must be addressed with long-term solutions, not scary exclamations like “your family’s share is $________________.”

There actually is (or used to be) a “national debt clock,” visible on 6th Avenue and 42nd Street in New York City, and it has been (or was) there for more than 30 years, and it has been scary for more than 30 years. It was digital, and you could see the numbers going up, flickering faster than a gas pump. It was operated by a private individual or group, and I presume (perhaps unwisely) that it was adjusted periodically to keep pace with actual US government indebtedness. It was so scary 30 years ago that, in a weak and stupid moment 30 years ago, I thought, “Golly, America will be up the creek in just 3 – 5 years.” And here it is, 30 years later, with the same silly “clock” scaring the simple folks like Dave Hirsch into thinking that the sky is falling.

Nobody objected to the debt when our previous president and his boss, Dick Cheney, went to war (or should I say, went to 2 wars) in the Middle East early in the current century and declared that the budget deficit – and by implication, the debt that makes a deficit possible – “doesn’t matter.” No need for tax increases, not need to cancel tax cuts, no need to tell Grandma to buy her own health insurance or tell Alaskans to build their bridge to nowhere with their own money. So in 2008, when the US financial markets froze up, and some major US financial institutions were on the brink of collapse (some were on the far side of the “brink”), and the US economy went into sharp recession, and the US government needed to straighten out the mess made by some well-paid (perhaps over-paid) bankers with some government money (which is way more delicious than government cheese), the US government was already deeply in debt. Since then, a stagnant economy, made worse by a too-small economic stimulus that was too small because of the misguided ideology of Mr. Cheney’s political supporters, has accelerated the growth of US government debt.

So now, with Republicans are pretending to be seriously concerned about the debt that has been accumulating since President Roosevelt first tricked the people into authorizing the federal government to borrow money. Republicans have demonstrated very clearly that they don’t like US government debt unless is is rung up under their administrations.

As for the “political courage” of Congressman Paul Ryan that Mr. Hirsch touts in this article, that is surely laughable. Mr. Ryan comes from a district that believes his ideology, and far from jeopardizing his political future, his plan has strengthened it. One would expect a “political analyst” to correctly analyze the politics of Mr. Ryan’s plan, but Mr. Hirsch has gotten that wrong.

As for Mr. Ryan’s plan, many financial, budgetary and economic experts think it is fundamentally unsound, based upon erroneous and indefensible – if not laughable – assumptions about economic conditions.

Mr. Hirsch’s third paragraph is a bundle of non-sequiturs, most of them cliches and many of them just plain false or irrelevant. Read it and laugh. Here is a sample: “The basic thing that any person knows is that he must have a balanced budget. Yet, the main factor for a politician is to protect the status quo; to stick his head in the sand and protect unsustainable programs.”

What’s wrong with this bundle of nonsense? For starters, Mr. Hirsch does not recognize the difference between the microeconomic parameters of an indivisual and the macroeconomic realities of being the most powerful country in the world. The US government can have an unbalanced budget from time to time – as we have for many years, as we will for many more – but the US government can manage the problem with sound policies, none of which are contained in the Ryan plan. The US government had a budgetary surplus as recently as fiscal 2000, the result of wise tax policies under – gaaagh – Democratic President Bill Clinton. We can do it again, but not if we are gawking at the “national debt clock” and thinking, “I haven’t got my share of it, we got to kill this now.” But Mr. Hirsch thinks the US government must balance its budget the same way he and I must balance ours, in the same time frame, by the same methods.

Mr. Hirsch also tells us that politicians must be treacherous and irresponsible – stick there heads somewhere. Does Mr. Hirsch hate America? Hate freedom? Hate democracy? I don’t think so, but he does not understand that not all politicians are as treacherous as he postulates, and he does not understand who the responsible politicians are.

Well, there are ten paragraphs in Mr. Hirsch’s screed, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. As I said when I started – so much falsehood, so little time – or something like that.