Screw you, I like Glenn Beck.

I listen to a lot of right-wing pundits on the radio. I like talk radio. It beats the musical radio stations, NPR switches to crappy jazz and classical, Radio IQ loses reception the further I get from Blacksburg, and sometimes I actually learn something. I don't always agree with Glenn Beck, but sometimes I do. I'm a weird political animal. If I were to be illustrated as such, I'd probably look like some freakazoid creation from Spore.

But Glenn Beck is definitely correct to be worried about the economy. I think I could do without the whole astro-geological quasi-philosophical sudden-death analogy, but if that works to get his point across, then I can deal with it.

Let's say a giant asteroid was headed toward Earth right now and experts say it has a good chance of ending civilization as we know it. Let's also say that we've known about this asteroid for years but even as it gets closer and closer our leaders do nothing.

Well there may not be a space asteroid heading toward us, but there is an economic one -- and the threat to our future is just as severe.

Let me give you three numbers that will put this economic asteroid into perspective: $200 billion, $14.1 trillion, and $53 trillion.

# $200 billion is the approximate total amount of write-downs announced so far as a result of the current credit crisis.

# $14.1 trillion is the size of the entire U.S. economy

# And $53 trillion is (drum roll please) the approximate size of this country's bill for the Social Security and Medicare promises we've made.

According to the latest Social Security and Medicare Trustees report (and I use that term loosely since it has the word "trust" in it) released earlier this week, the economic asteroid will first make impact in the year 2019 when the Medicaid trust fund becomes insolvent.

Only an immediate 122 percent increase in Medicaid taxes and a 26 percent increase in Social Security taxes can prevent (or more likely, delay) its impact.

- Source

The rest of the article is much of the same-old. That we don't have enough money for all the fancy services (true) and that we need to drastically shrink the size of the government (true) and so on. What I find interesting in these pieces is that no real solutions are ever offered. And it's not just conservatives saying this kind of stuff, either. Paul Krugman has been saying this for quite some time, too. Right, so... we're fucked. How do we fix it?