The political bickering over the fiscal cliff looks small, and it is, in comparison to the larger demographic cliff the country already has sailed over with greater implications by far. The fiscal crisis in Washington today is just the beginning of the deeper financial plunge ahead – unless the economy is transformed to create new jobs with better-than-average wages to increase revenues, that is to say, expand the middle class. The Congress and the President can negotiate tax rates but they can do little about the birth, death and obesity rates changing the country and its fiscal foundations far more profoundly than current balances in the federal government’s accounts.
The largest of the combined financial problems, of course, are Medicare and Social Security – whose futures look problematic since the elderly are living longer, minorities are not earning enough to support these programs and the young are incurring obesity-related health-care costs scores of years before they should. When looked at analytically, the precise importance of the HispanicLatino population to the nation’s future becomes glaring. You do not have to know the actuarial and budgetary numbers to understand that the current fiscal abyss is part of the much larger problem. You cannot expect a growing HispanicLatino population with low, static incomes to support the growing cost of everything.