Trillions of dollars in out-of-control entitlement spending cannot be remedied by cuts in NASA, or even in the entire discretionary budget, defense included. Rather, the financial bleeding needs to be staunched where the hole is and nowhere else.
Republicans should embrace the possibility that Obamacare could pave the way toward lower health care entitlement spending overall. That won't be easy. But it's not unthinkable, either.
55 percent of the national budget consists of entitlements. These are established by law but do not get funds appropriated annually—not part of the usual give and take of the Congress and the administration. If you meet the criteria of the law, you get the money.
Obviously the first thing we need to do is repeal “Obamacare.” That's one entitlement that we can get rid of. And that's a couple trillion dollars in spending over the next 10 years.
It's clear that the medium and long-run fiscal challenges facing the country have to do with the rise of entitlement spending, they have to do with the longer run imbalances that we've created in the structure of the system.
Once an entitlement program has been created with millions of beneficiaries, it becomes almost impossible to repeal.
It is foolish for Republicans to continue opening the door to job-killing tax hikes while Democrats refuse to explain how they propose to reform mandatory spending - mostly entitlements - that makes up almost two-thirds of the federal budget.
Unless we get entitlement costs under control, Social Security will inevitably square off against national security.
Obamacare has driven entitlement spending up much faster than expected.
Republicans' focus on defunding or scaling back Obamacare - an unpopular entitlement program - rather than entitlements generally, namely Social Security and Medicare, has raised questions about their true objective. But critics forget that spending is fungible.
In fact, entitlement spending on programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security make up 54% of federal spending, and spending is projected to double within the next decade. Medicare is growing by 9% annually, and Medicaid by 8% annually.
During the campaign for re-election, Barack Obama at least made vague references to a willingness to accept $3 trillion of reduced spending in exchange for a $1 trillion dollar tax increase.
The discussion in Washington has changed dramatically. I mean, it's no longer a question of should we address entitlements - it's no longer a question of do we need to reduce spending in the future.
I'll let Democrats defend spending our grandchildren broke on entitlements.
We do ourselves a disservice when some of us cave to the myth that Social Security somehow drives the deficit.
Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.
The Democrats and Republicans need to come together. I've criticized Democrats for their unwillingness to address entitlement reform and Social Security and Medicare. Republicans, on the other hand, never saw a tax that they liked, even when it meant closing tax loopholes. They don't want to in any way support any revenue enhancements.
President Obama has admitted that Medicare is on an unsustainable course and that no amount of tax increases can fix it.
This country pays a price whenever our economy fails to deliver rising living standards to our citizens - which is exactly what has been the case for years now. We pay a price when our political system cannot come together and agree on the difficult but necessary steps to rein in entitlement spending or reform our tax system.
