This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 14, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A fiscal commission is painting a grim picture for U.S. debt.

And getting a handle on that debt sooner rather than later means cutting entitlements.

That advice is easy to give to the future but hard for politicians to take in the present.

And as baby boomers retire in larger and larger numbers, the price of inaction is rising rapidly.

Jagadish Gokle is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the new book Social Security,

a fresh look at policyatives, he comments.

What are these fiscal commissions supposed to do?

What is their function?

Fiscal commissions generally are suspected to be a way of avoiding having to make a decision

about certain issues immediately to basically postpone the issue by

appointing a commission letting them deliberate for a year or more, and then looking at the report and then saying,

maybe if you don't want to take the recommendations to heart and implement the policies, then say, you know, there are good reasons to ignore the report and then so we do nothing.

These strategies are used I think generally for very tricky and politically very difficult choices that we all face in the nation.

This commission is providing President Obama with information that he probably doesn't want,

that is, that the outlook for debt in the US is not not good. It's not good

both in the short term and in the long term with this recession and with the implications of the

health care new health care law that expands the entitlements to the uninsured, we are going to say rising and more than a trillion dollar

deficits annually, at least over the next 10 years according

to the CBO projections and thereafter the problem even I mean this is not a

benign situation by any means but the problem grows even worse as the baby boomers

...