I am cleaning out my workspace, in preparation for messing up a new one and I came across a pamphlet I have been carrying around ever since it was given to my by Robert Lenzner, then national editor of Forbes in 2000.  It is called Life Without Treasury Securities and was written by Albert M. Wojnilower an economist and then advisor to Monitor Clipper Partners, a private equity firm and Craig Drill Capital, a long-lived hedge fund.

"In the year 2013, according to the new Federal budget, the U.S. Government will have retired the public debt."

That's the lead.  Then, the warning:

"Such predictions, of course, are to be taken with many grains of salt."

Fourteen years later (Wojnilower delivered his paper for a conference of the Eastern Economic Association in late March, 2000) many grains of salt have been spilled and, as we all know, the public debt was not retired.  This renders the rest of Wojnilower's paper, which imagines how markets would function without risk free Treasury bonds as a benchmark and safe haven, more of an academic exercise.  I carry the pamphlet around as a reminder about long term predictions regarding big things.

Today, Atrios points out, the Federal government announced that the 2013 deficit came in in $139 billion lower than the deficit we would have gotten if we had enacted the Simpson-Bowles Plan. This is, as Atrios points out, a failure of policy.  We should be borrowing more at low rates of interest to fight unemployment but this is an old argument and both sides are now set in their ways, so I will let that be.

Revenue is climbing while outlays are falling and the budget gap is closing. Meanwhile, the economy continues to grow, making each year's shrinking deficit, and the total debt, a smaller part of the whole equation.

There are those in this debate who insist on a "long term" problem and these can be very difficult to argue with.  They have tales of demographic time bombs that make sense in isolation but that necessarily gloss over all of the unpredictables -- how Congress and the President enact budgets and spending is a good one or the rate of GDP growth in any given year is another.

Fourteen years ago, it seemed reasonable to imagine a world with no public U.S. debt.  Four years ago, the Simpson-Bowles Commission recommended a deficit reduction plan that reduced the deficit less than the sequester did. Long term thinking is necessary in these matters but long term planning should never assume certitude.  Between the forecast and the right policy there is more room than some may like you to believe.