A good blog post on deficit hawks, social security, and whatnot

Here is a good read from the UMKC New Economic Perspectives Blog (one of my favorites) and was written as a response to Laurence Koltikoff's piece from Bloomberg claiming that the U.S. is bankrupt. I think this blog post does a good job of explaining basic things about debt and deficits. Here is my favorite, albeit sardonic, paragraph regarding social safety nets:

The alarming situation we are in, according to the deficit hysteria crowd, is the result of the government running a Ponzi scheme for 6 decades as it has been taking resources from the young and giving them to the old. If their point is that we are taking real resources from the young and giving them to the old, then yes, that's what we are doing. And that's what every society is doing, has always done, and will always be doing unless you want to let the elderly population die of hunger. Ditto for infants—the lazy do-nothings expect us, the working age population, to take care of them! Why can't those lazy infants and elderly people pull their own weight?

If I recall correctly, a few years back the UMass Economics department had made up some department t-shirts that featured a "reptilian" drawing meant to represent how capitalism, like reptiles, does not care for its young and is cold-blooded in nature, or something like that. Deficit hawks too seem to take the reptilian route, cawing about the inefficiencies of social security and the like.

With all of these deficit hawks and capitalist reptiles, things are really starting to look like a zoo.