{"id":4951,"date":"2013-01-21T18:57:09","date_gmt":"2013-01-22T00:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4951"},"modified":"2013-01-21T18:57:09","modified_gmt":"2013-01-22T00:57:09","slug":"america%e2%80%99s-debt-dilemma-a-looming-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4951","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s debt dilemma: A looming crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/intl\/cms\/s\/0\/8c7758c8-63bb-11e2-af8c-00144feab49a.html#axzz2If2vmJYt\">Robin Harding:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>The US economy is in the doldrums, unemployment is stubbornly high and Social Security, the New Deal-era safety net for older Americans, is running out of money. It is 1981.<\/p>\n<p>To salvage the popular programme, President Ronald Reagan forms a commission. At its head is Alan Greenspan, the man he later makes chairman of the US Federal Reserve.<\/p>\n<p>The commission procrastinates but then, in a model of backroom bipartisanship that is hard to imagine today, a \u201cgang of nine\u201d does a deal. Payroll taxes go up; over time, so does the Social Security retirement age, from 65 to 67.<\/p>\n<p>But as Mr Greenspan recalls today, from his office overlooking Connecticut Avenue in downtown Washington, the fix was not forever. \u201cFunding over a 75-year period was all that the political system would take. What that does is create a very large deficit in the 76th year and forward.\u201d<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robin Harding: The US economy is in the doldrums, unemployment is stubbornly high and Social Security, the New Deal-era safety net for older Americans, is running out of money. It is 1981. To salvage the popular programme, President Ronald Reagan forms a commission. At its head is Alan Greenspan, the man he later makes chairman [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4951"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}