Uh... how can you make a projection for how much health care is gonna cost per person over the next 70 years? That graph seems kindof randomly generated.
Man has a point. It requires some hopelessly vague assumptions to predict population growth decades into the future, and it seems more than a little ridiculous to me that the #1 destination for people moving to a different country could wind up with a top-heavy population makeup agewise. We'd be the first nation in history to wind up with more old people than we can support. It also requires assuming that government income and expenditure will remain static in relationship to the economy and population for seventy years, which is patently absurd.
I think the recurrent argument that "we don't have enough to pay for Social Security (based on unprovable assumptions about the future), therefore we must reduce what Social Security pays" is a very ideological sort of myopia. We could totally pay for Social Security forever if the government had a little more revenue. The entire debate over government spending and taxation always comes back to three immovable objects - We can never touch Social Security, we can never reduce the military's budget, we can never raise taxes on anyone. Which keeps butting up against the three irresistible forces of American politics - We must pretend to cut welfare but only in inefficient ways, we must always increase defense spending, we must always lower taxes on someone. Needless to say, this is simply impossible to maintain. You could slash all non-military discretionary spending of any kind, and the government would still not be making enough money to pay for Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, the military, and the interest on the debt (which we have to pay so that people will keep loaning the government money). Just paying for the things the government is required to do by its own laws requires borrowing money.
I'm fully on board with examining Social Security. Means testing is finally entering the debate again - since the fund is meant for people who retire without enough money to pay for themselves (market crashes and pension slashes being big reasons), people who do retire with plenty of money and can prove that it's sustainable don't need no Social Security. That would hardly make the numbers add up totally, but it's a great start. Of course, "means testing" tends to wind up in the "lets not and say we did" pile along with that old saw "Waste, Fraud, and Abuse". It's always refreshing to hear that come up in discussion again - it was Ronald Reagan's go-to answer when he first promised to solve this exact same question thirty years ago, and it's all the incoming Republican congress has to offer either, so far. Social Security is among the
least bureaucratically wasteful things the federal government does (since it's pretty straightforward), so good luck with that guys.
That Presidential debt commission's plans are pretty stultifying - I'd link to a summary, but there's so many ideologically bent news reports on it, you'd be better off Googling it and piecing the story together by hand. Being chaired by
Ernie Bowles, the godfather of corporatist Democrats and
Alan Simpson, arch-enemy of all federal welfare, the big news is, surprise surprise, we will solve the deficit by slashing a few deliverable social service programs and giving massive tax cuts for businesses. If this nation doesn't wake up and grow up to the fact that, yes, social welfare services are needed for a functioning first-world society, and yes, you do actually have to raise money to pay for them, then a federal debt crash is going to absolutely obliterate any real avenue of economic mobility and entrepreneurship when the federal banking system has to shut its doors. And if these are the kind of "experts" the government is going to turn to, and this is the kind of bald-faced political theology they're going to deliver, then all hope is lost.
Source; Congressional Budget Office.
And yet, you call their findings hogwash and wild-eyed communism when the CBO says
public healthcare would reduce the deficit, or that the budget hole has more to blame on
tax cuts at any cost rather than
domestic spending programs. I kid actually, as long as the debate is about possible solutions rather than standing facts, I really don't have an issue with picking and choosing what to believe from the same source.
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Topic: Politics Thread. No personal insults. Uber Sensitive Need Not Apply. (Read 7801 times)