Blog of Sin

GAO Chief Warns Economic Disaster Looms

As they say in the article, there’s no way to make fiscal responsibility into a sexy and pallatable topic for politicians.  Reform has to come from the people, not from the entertainers we elect to office.

Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.

Here I have to speak to the baby boomers.  Any government medical benefits will come to your demographic first, and it will bleed the nation like a 17th century physician.  It is unconscionable, irresponsible, and untennable.  There’s no way we can keep adding social benefits and maintain a dominant position on the world stage.  We’re borrowing money from foreign countries to maintain this way of life right now, and that obviously can’t last.

Can you honestly see yourself going to your children and demanding a 25% allowance from their paychecks?  Damn their future, damn their children and how well they live, it’s “give me 25% of what you earn, right now, hand it over, love ya, buh-bye.”  Could you do that to their face?  Could you really demand that from them?

If you can’t do it to their faces, then you can’t do it through taxes.  It’s like asking a mobster to demand money from them — for protection y’see — instead of you asking them directly.  It’s wrong.

Remember, all the money you put into Social Security has gone to your now-elderly parents and to whatever feel-good pet projects your federal representatives could endorse.  There’s no lock-box.  None.  It’s spent, gone, non-existent.

[Social Security] currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.

Eventually someone’s going to have to bite the bullet and take the cut.  I highly doubt the boomer generation will be able to bring themselves to take the pain.  Gen-X will probably just complain a lot (like me) and take what they can get; reluctantly voting to reduce benefits little by little.  Gen-Y?  Same thing.  Maybe by then the future generational block will have developed a stronger sense of personal responsibility and cut harder and deeper than before, bringing boondoggle social programs down to nothingness.  Maybe… but I doubt it.

Unaviodable catastrophe seems to be the only thing that teaches us monkeys a lesson.  Until the repercussions of our ill-actions are put in our faces — like house training a pet — we feel invincible, like nothing can harm us.  Just ask the people who’ve been in car accidents; they didn’t think they were going to crash, so they continued recklessly until their actions resulted in catastrophe.  Then they learned… or died trying.