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© International Monetary Fund. Not for Redistribution cal policy is huge for plausible discount rates,” which are rates applied to future receipts or payments to determine their present value.“Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of US GDP.” Data from the US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) long-term alternative fiscal scenario confirm the IMF’s findings. Based on the CBO data, closing the fiscal gap requires an annual fiscal adjustment of roughly 12 percent of GDP. This is based on a 3 percent real discount rate. Using a 6 percent real discount rate lowers this figure to about 8 percent of GDP. The comparable figures for Greece are slightly lower than those for the United States, according to unpublished calculations by Stephan Moog, Christian Hagist, and Bernd Raffelheuschen of the University of Freiburg. What would it take to raise 8 percent, let alone 12 or 14 percent, of GDP? In 2009, federal personal income taxes totaled 7.4 percent of GDP in the United States. To achieve present value fiscal balance would require a change in the present value of the government’s net cash flow equivalent to at least an immediate and permanent doubling of income taxes. The CBO forecast actually is more pessimistic than the IMF’s. That’s because the CBO already builds in a 50 percent increase in personal income tax payments as a share of GDP. In addition, the CBO assumes that growth in the benefit levels of Medicare and Medicaid—government programs that provide health care to the elderly and poor, respectively—will fall by about one-third in the short term and two-thirds in the long term …