Today's Opinions

If you watched a recent college football game between the universities of Utah and Southern California, you couldn’t have missed a somewhat strange interlude when the announcers rattled off statistics about the amount of money PAC 12 universities are spending on stadiums.

“The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut considered almost nothing to be sacred — except libraries. He viewed them as a place to go when you are bereft, lost, lonely, a place which offers the sort of sustenance that calories alone can’t provide.

The enormity of the federal government’s liabilities is the biggest challenge we face. As of the moment I write this, national debt stands at about $14.652 trillion (add a few billion by the time you read this). Yet debt is only a part of the equation: Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff estimates that the “real liability” of the federal government is actually in excess of $70 trillion.
No wonder markets weren’t jumping for joy when Congress and the president agreed to a deal that nets only $900 billion in cuts over the next 10 years.