Courtesy of Bruce Krasting.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report that evaluates the consequences of adopting the chained CPI. I was surprised by the results. The numbers are “so good” that this approach will rise to the top of the budget cutting debate. I’m sure that was the intent of the folks at CBO with this timely release. (CBO LINK)
If America is going to accomplish anything with the debt/deficit issue it needs to either generate more revenue, or cut expenses. Some combo is going to be the outcome. The numbers have to be big. Anything less than $1T over ten years is hardly worth the effort. $2T would be desirable, but hard to achieve. Something around $1.5T over ten-years would take all the bull-shit over this issue off the front pages for a few years.
So we “need” $1.5T stretched out over a decade. The CBO concludes that we can come up with $340B (25%) of the nut by changing inflation calculations. That’s a big down payment. Some details:
…
