From a USA Today editorial:
source: January 25th USA Today
As the paper explains:
In reality, the nation is in a serious bind not so much because of the actions of presidents and Congresses, but because of their lack of action. More than 60% of federal spending is on autopilot. Most of this comes from benefit programs, also known as entitlements, such as Medicare and Social Security. In just four years, as the result of growing entitlements and rising interest costs on the national debt, some two-thirds of Washington's dollars will be so-called mandatory spending. . .Agreed.
To be sure, there's bloat in the federal bureaucracy and defense spending. But the real drivers of looming deficits are Medicare, projected to grow from $516 billion this year to $932 billion in 2018, and Social Security, forecast to grow from $581 billion this year to $966 billion in 2018 as Baby Boomers retire.
See also Heritage Foundation.
(via Reason magazine, The Corner)
2 comments:
This is why that mostly-orange pie chart purporting to show how much of our budget goes to defense infuriates me. It leaves out the enormous percentage of the budget illustrated above by claiming that it's not "discretionary" spending.
The boomers created this mess by ignoring the warnings about its nature as a Ponzi scheme.
They should be the ones to bear the burden of substantially reduced benefits as they retire. Give 'em 50 cents on the dollar, whatever it takes to get the program under control, and institute long term fixes to eliminate the Ponzi nature of it.
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