RALEIGH – My columnist’s notebook has been filling up with statistics, anecdotes, and analysis about the emerging fiscal and political crisis in Washington that is, in turn, helping to fuel financial and economic distress around the world.

Here are some of the observations I’ll be thinking about in the coming days and weeks:

• Economists Scott Beaulier and Peter Boettke write in the latest Cato Policy Report about Washington’s failed fiscal policies. In an welcome burst of fresh air, they lay blame at the feet of President Obama, President Bush, and leaders of both political parties who have proven themselves to be “unwilling to tackle serious fiscal challenges” such as the nation’s unfunded entitlement liabilities.

Beaulier and Boettke point out that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid already collectively account for 10 percent of gross domestic product. As the Baby Boomer retire, the percentage will soar. By 2052, these three programs alone are projected to consume 18.2 percent of GDP – basically all the available federal revenue at any realistic level of federal taxation.

Do you consider this scenario attractive? Neither do I. Neither does anyone else with a modicum of common sense.

• From the end of World War II until 2008, publicly held federal debt ranged from 23 percent to 49 percent of GDP. As this percentage grew back into the 40s during the Bush administration, fiscal conservatives cried foul. They were right to do so. Even at levels of 40 percent to 50 percent of GDP, government debt represents resources not devoted to their most-productive uses, and inflicts higher debt-service costs on future generations of taxpayers who weren’t consulted about the extra spending.

But during the first three years of the Obama administration, the debt problem became a debt catastrophe. You can’t run deficits of more than a $1 trillion a year and not markedly worsen the government’s balance sheet. Publicly held federal debt rose to 54 percent of GDP, then 62 percent of GDP. If present trends continue, it will reach more than 100 percent of GDP by 2021. That year, says the Heritage Foundation, it would take half of Washington’s income-tax revenues just to pay interest on the debt.

• That means that within the next few years, the publicly held debt of the United States will exceed the 90 percent threshold that some economists believe is a kind of tipping point for nation’s entering long-term economic decline. The two scholars responsible for much of the new research in this area, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, wrote a Bloomberg Businessweek article last month explaining their findings.

Here’s a key passage in which they answer their critics:

Those who remain unconvinced that rising debt levels pose a risk to growth should ask themselves why, historically, levels of debt of more than 90 percent of GDP are relatively rare and those exceeding 120 percent are extremely rare. Is it because generations of politicians failed to realize that they could have kept spending without risk? Or, more likely, is it because at some point even advanced economies hit a ceiling where the pressure of rising borrowing costs forces policymakers to increase tax rates and cut government spending, sometimes precipitously, and sometimes in conjunction with inflation and financial repression (which is also a tax)?

I’m for cutting federal spending a lot, by the way. But even I think it is better to do so strategically, paring government to its constitutional essentials while giving citizens time to adjust, rather than in panic mode, by the seat of one’s pants.

• Liberals are trying to blame the S&P downgrade and subsequent economic turmoil on Tea Party conservatives. Of course they are. But conservatives have actually proposed plans that would have avoided the downgrade and gotten the country’s fiscal house in order over the next decade. Whatever you think of its merits, for example, Congressman Paul Ryan’s plan contained enough debt reduction to meet the expectations of the rating agencies.

What about President Obama’s plan? Or the U.S. Senate’s plan? Would they have achieved sufficient debt reduction? The rating agencies can’t answer the question, because there is no Obama plan or Senate plan to score.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.