Choices for the Future
The unsustainable nature of the federal government’s current tax and spending policies presents lawmakers and the public with difficult choices. Unless substantial changes are made to the major health care programs and Social Security, those programs will absorb a much larger share of the economy’s total output in the future than they have in the past. Even with spending for all other federal activities on track, by the end of this decade, to represent the smallest share of GDP in more than 70 years, total federal noninterest spending would be larger relative to the size of the economy than it has been, on average, over the past 40 years. The structure of the federal tax code means that revenues would also represent a larger percentage of GDP in the future than they have, on average, in the past few decades—but not large enough to keep federal debt held by the public from growing faster than the economy starting in the next several years. Moreover, because federal debt is already unusually high relative to GDP, further increases in debt could be especially harmful. To put the federal budget on a sustainable path for the long term, lawmakers would have to make significant changes to tax and spending policies—letting revenues rise more than they would under current law, reducing spending for large benefit programs below the projected levels, or adopting some combination of those approaches.
The size of such changes would depend on the amount of federal debt that lawmakers considered appropriate. For example, bringing debt back down to 39 percent of GDP in 2038—as it was at the end of 2008—would require a combination of increases in revenues and cuts in noninterest spending (relative to current law) totaling 2 percent of GDP for the next 25 years. (In 2014, 2 percent of GDP would equal about $350 billion.) If those changes came entirely from revenues, they would represent an increase of 11 percent relative to the amount of revenues projected for the 2014–2038 period; if the changes came entirely from spending, they would represent a cut of 10½ percent in noninterest spending from the amount projected for that period.
In deciding how quickly to carry out policy changes to make the size of the federal debt more sustainable, lawmakers face other trade-offs. On the one hand, waiting to cut federal spending or raise taxes would lead to a greater ac ulation of debt and would increase the size of the policy adjustments needed to put the budget on a sustainable course. On the other hand, implementing spending cuts or tax increases quickly would weaken the economy’s current expansion and would give people little time to plan for and adjust to the policy changes. The negative short-term effects that deficit reduction has on output and employment would be especially large now, because output is so far below its potential level that the Federal Reserve is keeping short-term interest rates near zero and could not lower those rates further to offset the impact of changes in spending and tax policies.
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EN is trying to talk specifics and you get more vague trying to cling to your ideology. Nothing if not pigheaded. 
