The government already has made so many promises to so many expanding "mandatory" programs. Just keeping these commitments, without major changes in taxing and spending, will lead to deficits that cannot be sustained.Agreed.
Take Social Security, Medicare and other benefits. Add in interest payments on a national debt that now exceeds $12.3 trillion. It all will gobble up 80 percent of all federal revenues by 2020, government economists project.
That doesn't leave room for much else. . .
It's not clear when the debt's day of reckoning will arrive. But the overall national debt over the next few years will rise to 100 percent of the gross domestic product -- a level viewed as alarming by the International Monetary Fund and international economists.
The Social Security system, the biggest social spending program, has begun paying out more in benefits than it collects in payroll taxes. For the past quarter-century, Social Security had produced a surplus that helped finance the rest of the government.
Medicare, the health care program that now covers 45 million elderly and disabled people, is in worse shape. It's been paying out more than it takes in since 2008 and its trust fund is projected to run out of money in 2017.
(via Don Surber)
1 comment:
I think the least painful solution is severe inflation. Let's hope it can be resolved by some real fiscal "sense" in government spending and keeping inflation under 20% for several years. Some of those "mandates" will need to be trimmed back.
Is there anyone out there not a boomer who actually expected to ever see a dime of SS? Can we, for all our benefits, just cancel those obligations before they collapse the nation totally, as long as we promise to eliminate the system in general in favor of a non-Ponzi scheme pension plan?
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