I’ve blogged repeatedly about the fraud of the Social Security “trust fund,” which is really nothing more than a promise by the federal government to raise either taxes or the budget deficit (or both) in the future.
Well, that’s just the tip of the iceberg:
You owe $145,000. And the bill is rising every day. That’s how much it would cost every American man, woman and child to pay the tab for the long-term promises the U.S. government has made to creditors, retirees, veterans and the poor.
…
The nation’s three biggest entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — make promises for retirement and health care (for the elderly and the poor) which carry a huge price tag that balloons as the population grows and ages.Add it up: current debt and deficit, promises for those big programs, pensions, veterans health care. The total comes to $43 trillion, says [David] Walker, the nation’s comptroller general, who runs the Government Accountability Office. That’s where the $145,000 bill for every American, or $350,000 for every full-time worker, comes from.
Does anyone seriously believe we can “grow our way out of” $350,000 per working American? Or that raising taxes to make up for the fraud of the Social Security “trust fund” is “no big deal”? Or that the tax-and-spend Republicans won’t make matters worse with even more entitlements and pork-barrel legislation?
Or that the inevitable result of all this over the next 10-15 years will be dramatic increases in taxes and interest rates (and possibly inflation, if the government rediscovers debt monetization)?
The conservatives insist there’s no budget crisis. The liberals insist there’s no Social Security crisis. Almost no one in either cabal ever speaks of the Medicare crisis, and few mention the various parallel budget crises at the state and local level.
A pox on all their houses.
The GAO has a recent report on the state of long-term federal government finances (PDF – 94 pages).
