Fiscal sustainability is one of the most pressing policy issues of our time. Yet it remains difficult to quantify. Official debt is plagued with a number of measurement difficulties since its measurement reflects the choice of words, not policies. And forming the fiscal gap-the imbalance in the...

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- Chapter 1. The United States Is Bankrupt -- Chapter 2. Catastrophic Success -- "No One Here Gets Out Alive"-Jim Morrison -- Moving the Curve -- The Other Mortality Curves -- Longevity Marches On -- When Life's Not Cheap -- Centenarians, Left,...

Although the deficit is a useful construct for Keynesian analyses of fiscal policy, the deficit appears to be a less useful measure of fiscal policy within all but a restricted class of intertemporal neoclassical models. This paper suggests that the nature of deficits in a simple certainty model...