“Economist Mom” Warns About Long-Term Federal Spending Crisis
“This graph is kind of scary,” Diane Lim Rogers said as a slide appeared on the screens in the Appellate Courtroom of Eckstein Hall.
The graph showed accumulated public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product, starting in the World War II years and projected through the next several decades. The path of the line in coming years rose so sharply that Rogers said it would never actually happen. Something will force a change.
That was the core point of Rogers’ hour-long “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session Oct. 11 at Marquette Law School: We can’t stay on the path we’re on when it comes to trends in federal government revenue and federal government spending. Something will force a change, and it can either come from informed, visionary decision making or it can from the forces that will change things in any case, and perhaps not so gently.
Rogers is chief economist for the Concord Coalition, a national non-partisan organization formed by Republican and Democratic leaders who want to see what they call “generationally responsible fiscal policy.”