TYLER COWEN: The Fiscal Illusion: “As we fail to make progress on entitlement reform with each passing year, Professor Buchanan’s essentially moral critique of deficit spending looks more prophetic. We are fooling ourselves most of all. United States government debt in public hands is now more than $9 trillion, but most people still don’t realize what it will take to pay that off. . . . The famous Keynesian rejoinder, ‘In the long run we are all dead,’ is less comforting when that long run comes into sight.”

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. That’s going to be the theme for this decade, I suspect.