How close to the edge are we now.

These reports are a couple of years old now. I haven't found anything more recent, but the trend is clear so we can extrapolate. I think there is evidence that we are closer to the edge of the economic cliff than the nerds who have reacted to this topic so far want to believe.

This tends to indicate that the complacent view that, we made it through the Cold War so we can handle Iraq, is starting to look a bit naive.

These first quotes come from the SanFrancisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/17/MNG5GDPEK31.DTL Sure, they are just opinions, but they come from credible sources.

"Osama (bin Laden) doesn't have to win; he will just bleed us to death," said Michael Scheuer, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA who led the pursuit of bin Laden and recently retired after writing two books critical of the Clinton and Bush administrations. "He's well on his way to doing it."

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, has estimated that the Korean War cost about $430 billion and the Vietnam War cost about $600 billion, in current dollars. According to the latest estimates, the cost of the war in Iraq could exceed $700 billion.

(I presume that the statutory debt limit has been raised again a few times more since these reports.)

Put simply, critics say, the war is not making the United States safer and is harming U.S. taxpayers by saddling them with an enormous debt burden, since the war is being financed with deficit spending.

One of the most vocal Republican critics has been Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who said the costs of the war -- many multiples greater than what the White House had estimated in 2003 -- are throwing U.S. fiscal priorities out of balance.

"It's dangerously irresponsible," Hagel said in February of the war spending.

In the last 50 years, the United States has raised its debt ceiling more than 70 times, and budget watchers say lawmakers have become expert at delaying or disguising this politically perilous task.

"The antics they go through are incredible, and they've gotten worse,'' said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington, D.C.

For instance, in his Dec. 29 letter, Snow said that while the debt limit "will be reached in mid-February 2006," he could delay default for a month using "available prudent and legal actions."

These actions, MacGuineas said, would include putting IOUs instead of cash into federal retirement accounts -- a tactic that Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin first employed in 1996, when Republican lawmakers balked at raising a debt ceiling then at $4.9 trillion.

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