Michael Tanner‘s latest column at National Review Online explains why presidential candidates might want to think twice about their White House bids.

… [A] new president will be sworn in on January 20, 2017. And, whether that president is Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or a still unidentifiable third possibility, he or she will have to deal with some very real problems. Among them:

Deficits are back: Over the past seven years, a combination of increased revenue and spending restraint reduced our annual budget deficit from $1.4 trillion to just $439 billion. But those days are over. This year, the deficit is expected to rise to $544 billion, a $105 billion increase from last year. From here on out, unless drastic changes are made, it just keeps rising. Six years from now, in 2022, we will be back to trillion-dollar deficits every year. …

… The wreckage of Obamacare: With each passing day, it becomes more obvious that the Affordable Care Act is a failure — maybe not the brilliant explosive failure once envisioned, but the drip, drip, drip of unremitting bad news. After a decade of relative restraint, the cost of medical care is rising at its fastest rate since 2012. Obamacare premiums are up as much as 41 percent in some states, physician networks are shrinking, and insurers in eleven states report loss ratios above 100 percent, threatening an adverse-selection death spiral. …

… Slow growth and too few jobs: The recovery from the Great Recession remains one of the slowest recoveries in history, with a real average growth rate of just 2.1 percent since 2010. Although unemployment has dropped to 4.9 percent, workforce participation continues to lag. (In fairness, our aging population is responsible for a significant portion of the long-term decline in workforce participation, but discouraged workers remain a big problem.) Those regions hardest hit by the recession have not bounced back as fast as other regions, with employment rates still as much as 1.3 percent below comparable areas. More than a quarter of the 7.8 million unemployed have been jobless six months or longer; that figure is about 70 percent higher than before the Great Recession.