Blinder warns Medicare spending threatens deficit control

{mosads}Speaking with Yahoo’s “Daily Ticker” blog, Blinder warned the fight could lead to a government shutdown or a breach in the debt ceiling.

Blinder is promoting a new book — After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response and the Work Ahead — in which he writes that even reducing the deficit by 2.5 percent of gross domestic product would mean budget cuts worth $5 trillion.

“Republicans will have to concede that while it is arithmetically possible to do the entire job on the spending side, it is politically impossible,” he writes. “Democrats will have to concede that the majority of deficit reduction must come on the spending side, including entitlements like Medicare.”