Justin Fox, Columnist

Beware of Economists Crying 'Entitlement Explosion'

Our inability to speak frankly about the nation's fiscal situation has real consequences.

March 29, 2018 at 4:40 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Someone has to pay.
Photographer: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

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A quintet of notable Republican economists (one of them a former secretary of both Treasury and State)1522256939354 has a warning for our nation. For years, big, chronic federal deficits have loomed in the country's future. Now, Michael J. Boskin, John H. Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor write in the Washington Post:

A few paragraphs later, the five -- all senior fellows at Stanford University's Hoover Institution -- add: