A protester holds a sign as he stands in the rain during a “National March On Wall Street” event.

A well-known columnist says the US will be forced to adopt strenuous measures if it hopes to keep its massive national debt in check, the financial newspaper Kauppalehti reports.

“Financial columnist Laurence Kotlikoff comes out with what many believe to be the case: the United States is bankrupt. Consumption growth and tax cuts are not helping the country to pay its debt, he writes on the website Bloomberg.

The US is in worse shape than Greece. In the future, the US will see a rise in poverty, tightened taxation and a rise in interest rates and consumer prices, the columnist predicts.

The United States must radically simplify its taxation, healthcare, and pension and financing systems, all of which are in a chaotic state. And this, moreover, is good news because it means that all these sectors could be reorganised to perform their respective functions for much less than the present cost and in a way that revives the economy.

Last month, the International Monetary Fund published its annual report on US economic policy. The following feeble statement is included in the summary: the IMF thanks the US administration’s attempts to balance the economy through taxation but notes that adaptive measures of a greater scale than those planned are required to balance debt with the national economy.”

KAUPPALEHTI 11 AUGUST
Lehtikuva - Spencer Platt