[albionmoonlight]

At base, I hope that things like this make people realize that the politicians who state and/or imply that we can restore fiscal sanity without touching Social Security, Medicare, defense spending, or taxes are either stupid or lying.

I think that a lot of citizens (with the encouragement of the political establishment) still hold the fundamentally un-serious belief that the federal government could balance the budget tomorrow and still have room for a tax-cut by cutting foreign aid and the National Endowment for the Arts.

It's not true. We either pay more taxes, lose some retirement benefits, have a less funded military, or (ideally) do some combination of all of these. The other alternative is the fiscal abyss.