Antithesis of a leader

 Here is Erskine Bowles on the crisis we're facing.

The economics is very clear. The politics, very difficult. I'll give you one little simple arithmetic example. If you take 100% of the revenue that came into the country last year, every single dime of it was consumed by our mandatory spending and interest on the debt. Mandatory spending in English is basically the entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. That means every single dollar we spent last year on these two wars, on national defense, homeland security, education, infrastructure, high value-added research—every single dollar was borrowed, and half of it was borrowed from foreign countries.

That's a formula for failure in anybody's book.

And this is not a problem that we can solely grow our way out of. You could have double-digit growth for decades and not solve this problem. It's not a problem that we can solely tax our way out of. And we can't simply cut our way out of it.

Read the rest of the article: http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/2011/11/when-president-fails-to-lead.html