James Kwak updates his projections in the article Updating October’s Long-Term Debt Projections. He concludes:

The most important point remains the same: If we let the Bush tax cuts expire, the national debt will be significant and rising in the long term, but will not be that much larger than today even in 2035. Which means that the national debt problem over the next twenty-five years is as much about tax cuts as about entitlement spending.

Ben Leet commented on that post as follows:

As Dean Baker and Jeff Madrick say repeatedly, the health care system is the driver for high federal deficits in the years to come.

They may both be right.  Note, that if we were to fix the cost problem for the government funded part of the health care system, but did not fix it for the privately funded part of the system, health care would still eventually take 100% of the GDP.  The issue of the rising costs  of health care progressing at the current rate is completely independent of whether it is paid for by  the government, direct payment by private citizens, or funded through employers.  The result on our economy will be devastating.

Simon Johnson has another interesting article Austerity and the Modern Banker posted on Truth Out.

The protesters of “Occupy Albany” issued a powerful consensus statement recently, which reads in part:

“The interests of those who purchase influence are rewarded at the expense of the People, from whom the government’s just power is derived. We believe that this failure in our system is at the core of many interconnected issues we face as a society, and its resolution is key to a just future. We therefore demand true democracy, decoupled from the corrosive influence of concentrated economic power, and we call all who share in this common goal to stand with us and take action toward this end.”
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Jon Huntsman, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, is addressing this directly – insisting that we should force the largest banks to break up and to become safer. No other candidate for the presidency is seriously confronting this issue head-on: just saying “we’ll let them fail” is no kind of answer when the failure of megabanks would cause so much damage.

We should learn from both the WaMu and the Occupy movement. In both cases, the lesson is the same: concentrated financial power is a gift that keeps on giving – but not to you.

As for the statement about Jon Huntsman, perhaps this is why some Democrats in New Hampshire are crossing over to vote for Huntsman in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.