The Nation Of Change has published Robert Reich’s article – Cliff Notes on the Three Real Perils Ahead.  The executive summary is:

Yes, America does face a cliff — not a fiscal cliff but a set of precipices we’ll tumble over because the GOP’s obsession over government’s size and spending has obscured them.

The three cliffs are:

The child poverty cliff.

The baby-boomer healthcare cliff.

Healthcare costs are already 18% of GDP. Between now and 2030, when 76 million boomers join the ranks of the elderly,those costs will soar. This is the principal reason why the federal budget deficit is projected to grow.

The Affordable Care Act offers a start but it isn’t nearly adequate to limit these rising costs. The President and the Democrats have to lead the way in using Medicare and Medicaid’s bargaining power over providers to get lower costs and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system of healthcare.

But we can’t avoid the fact we have the most expensive and least effective system of health care in the world that’s spending 30 percent more on paperwork and administration than on keeping people healthy. The real healthcare cliff can only be avoided if we adopt a single-payer healthcare system.

The environmental cliff.

For people obsessed with the deficit, read the section on The baby-boomer healthcare cliff. It is a good explanation of what the real problem is, what Obama has tried to do to solve it, and what more needs to be done. All the rest of the malarkey coming from the Republicans is just noise.