Re: Medicare and other such “entitlements”.
If you look at the estimates in the last Bush 2008 Budget, for mandatory federal government expenditures for “Entitlements”–the major ones being Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veteran’s benefits, Federal civilian and military retirement benefits, food stamps and unemployment benefits–they were estimated to account for 63.1% of all federal outlays in 2008 and to be 12.6% of GDP (see Historical Table. 3.1, Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940-2012, and look at the part of the chart that covers 2008 and is labeled “as percentage of outlays” and “as percentage of GDP” at http://tinyurl.com/c6knwa; the 2009 Obama budget estimates such mandatory entitlement outlays will to climb to 69.2% of all outlays by 2013 (see same Table for 2009 at http://tinyurl.com/dmswg6).
Thus, this apparently unstoppable, voracious monster of mandatory entitlement spending is inexorably consuming more and more of the federal budget each year, and at some point not too far in the future, it will consume all of it, leaving no money left to pay for anything else.
All this, of course, before factoring in the effects of the tens of trillions of dollars in new spending Obama wants to do, creating enormous deficits because it will be using money borrowed from lenders like the Chinese–who taxpayers will have to pay interest to in the form of new taxes–as well as the crippling rise in energy costs that Obama’s proposed “cap and trade” will mean for each of us and for our economy generally.
I submit that no better plan to wreck our economy and pauperize us, and our children, and their children, too, could probably be conceived.
