A couple of weeks ago, my esteemed fellow blogger and close watcher of all things economic, Eric Lundin, wrote a post entitled “We’ve all fallen off the fiscal cliff.” Commenting on the last-minute deal Congress approved to avoid sending the U.S. economy off the fiscal cliff, Lundin said, “Yes, superficially, the new legislation prevented the U.S. economy from becoming the equivalent of a high-speed train wreck. However, it didn’t deal with the broad, deep, fundamental problems that are weakening the foundation of the U.S. economy. We have the same problems we had before this legislation passed, and the U.S. economy will eventually go off the rails. It won’t be sudden. It will play out like a painfully slow train wreck. Rather than a couple dozen freight cars piling up in a matter of seconds, it will take a decade or two, but it will happen nonetheless.”

This blog post became the lead story in January’s “Tube Talk” e-newsletter, and we asked readers to share their thoughts about the pending train wreck. Here’s what some of them had to say (the caps are all theirs): (more...)