Column: The U.S. is broke. Here's why. - Opinion - USATODAY.com

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Column: The U.S. is broke. Here's why. - Opinion - USATODAY.com

The disease? Fiscal sclerosis — setting future national priorities in stone long before the future has arrived. Our fiscal arteries are so clogged and hardened that to do anything new, meet any emergency, or engage any new opportunity, the president must renege on past legislators' promises regarding Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other such entitlement programs. If he doesn't address unsustainable promises head-on, Obama will have no wiggle room in the budget for the rest of his presidency, and government will be tied up with yesterday's problems and the demands of yesterday's voters.

Thanks to decades of promises for ever-higher benefits and low taxes for the indefinite future, there's now less give in future budgets than at any point in American history. At least profligate Congresses in the past confined their excesses and temporarily large deficits to the current year. Until recently, they didn't box in the future.

Both Democratic and Republican presidents and Congresses have presided over this shocking decline — fighting mainly over which downward path we'd take: by cutting revenues without reducing spending or increasing spending without raising revenues commensurately.

Imagine a business signing 50- and 100-year contracts that tied up all the hoped-for future revenues.

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