With many blaming the toxicity of the entitlements issue for a Republican congressional special election loss in New York last Tuesday, determining where elected leaders should go from here in addressing the national debt has been problematic. Does it remain “political suicide” to take tough stands on Medicare and Social Security?

On Friday’s “Inside Washington,” Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, the grandson of six-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, said regardless of the politics, there will be some serious problems facing the country if these issues aren’t addressed.

“This is no longer a theoretical exercise,” Thomas said. “Every chart, every graph, everybody who has ever looked at it is faced with this reality – that if we do not get control of our debt situation, which is driven by entitlements, we are going to have a lower standard of living in this country for sure. We are going to have high inflation and people are going to live less well.”

Thomas warned that “very bad things could happen” as a result of trying to get America’s debt problem under control.

“It’s even more than that,” he continued. “Liberal democracies are not very good about cutting back, about doing with less. We’ve never really been challenged this way. Britain is going through this right now and Britain is sort of the canary in the coal mine if you ask me. They are actually trying to cut back their welfare state. We’ll see how it goes. We should be watching them to see how their liberal democracy can do this because if we don’t, Charles [Krauthammer] – maybe it is a little apocalyptic to say we’re going to be Greece, but we could have social unrest. Very bad things could happen.”

“Inside Washington” host Gordon Peterson questioned, despite those dire warnings, why people in their late 50s and 60s shouldn’t be concerned about losing their entitlement payments?

“But, the late 50s and 60s are not affected by the Ryan plan,” syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer protested. “That’s the demagoguery. That’s the lying about that. It doesn’t affect them.”