Yet another book to add to the must-read-soon pile:

...Most countries' explicit net debt - issued as bonds and traded every
day in financial markets - is at manageable levels, relative to GDP. However, embodied in current tax and expenditure policies are a lot of obligations for which governments have not yet had to make explicit
provision. This implicit liability arises mainly from future increases in spending on pensions and health care. Include it, and total debt vaults to levels last seen (for explicit debt) in wartime. Governments often fall into bad habits when their debts are so high, usually by resorting to the printing press and using inflation to cut the real value of their liabilities....

So what is to be done? First, governments must look much farther ahead
than they do now. An increasing number of western countries are planning their public finances on a basis of three to five years, but this is nowhere near enough, argues Mr Heller. They need to incorporate a long-range perspective (of at least 25 years and preferably more) into their budgets. Second, these projections should be vetted by independent agencies such as America's Congressional Budget Office, because of governments' tendency to see the silver lining and not the cloud....