This piece puts Obama's over-bloated budget proposal into perspective. Forget the broken promise to halve the federal deficit by the end of his 4 years in office (who knows if he could have really done it if he tried) and look at the sheer numbers.
This chart is highly interactive, and it allows the user to manipulate and move and study various budget components.
What do I take away from it?
- The size of entitlements + debt interest alone ($1.18 T for Medicaid and Medicare, $875.5 B for Social Security, $472 B on debt interest) = $2.572 TRILLION, or about what the government collects in taxes.
- The $2 T in Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security is the for government simply taking care of people instead of people making the choices to take care of themselves. This is staggering. The government spends $65,179 per second (about twice the income of the average American) for things that people could easily do for themselves (save for their retirement, late-life health costs, etc) while they are working. Yes, I understand that part of Social Security is for disability payments and yes, these people cannot help themselves (I have no problem funding this), but too much of Social Security has been turned into a retirement/pension fund. Can't regular Americans just save for their own retirement? Or do we need the government doing this for us because we are too dumb and incapable of doing this for ourselves?
- The rate of increase for these programs (8.4% for CMS, 6.7% for SS) far exceeds inflation.
My question: how in the world is this sustainable? How is this kind of spending going to help us avoid becoming the next Greece?
Please share your thoughts below. Thank you.
Did some math: $108.1 billion or 2.92% is spent on funding the IRS. We spend almost 3% of what we take in funding the engine that takes it in. If that isn't government inefficiency, I don't know what is.
ReplyDelete$901 BILLION DEFICIT. That's all I have to say. We cannot sustain this any longer.
ReplyDelete