U.S. federal budget deficit could approach a record $500 billion this year

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Gokhale said fixing the massive shortfall, assuming the government chooses not to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, will soon force the government to pick from a "menu of pain," in the words of economists Laurence Kotlikoff and Jeffrey Sachs, who in a recent opinion piece in the Boston Globe first reported the findings of the Gokhale-Smetters study. The options:

boost individual and corporate taxes 69 percent
raise payroll taxes 95 percent
cut non-Social Security and non-Medicare spending 56 percent
eliminate all other federal government spending