Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes. It's going to be that we're actually going to take Medicare under control, and we're going to have to get some additional revenue, probably from a VAT. But it's not going to happen now.

Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: it's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.

Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.

People who are complaining about the Fed are people who've been predicting runaway inflation for five and six years, and it hasn't happened.

We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis.