Forget all the numbers being tossed around in Washington — the millions and billions and trillions of dollars being taxed, borrowed, printed and spent as the country approaches the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline.
Forget the political jockeying for position between a president desperately seeking re-election in 16 months and a Congress equally desperately seeking not to be blamed for spending even more money that we don’t have.
Forget the fact that such “entitlements” as Social Security and Medicare — social-insurance programs that the public long thought to be actuarially sound — have been exposed as little more than legal Ponzi schemes, paying today’s benefits out of tomorrow’s borrowed receipts.
Instead, just ask yourself this simple question: When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks?
For this, in essence, is what the debt-ceiling fight is all about — the inexorable and ultimately fatal growth of the welfare state. If you don’t believe it, just look at President Obama’s veiled threat to withhold Grandma’s Social Security benefits if Congress doesn’t let him borrow another $2 trillion or so to get himself safely past the 2012 election.
The feds now borrow 43 cents of every dollar they spend. Under Obama, outlays have soared to nearly a quarter of GDP (the historical average is just under 20 percent) — and once ObamaCare starts to fully kick in around 2014, it will only rise.
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and debt interest consume — at the moment — nearly half of our $3.8 trillion budget.
When Medicare began in 1966, it cost $3 billion; congressional estimates were that, by 1990, it would cost about $12 billion, allowing for inflation. The actual figure turned out to be $107 billion. Today, Medicare’s future unfunded obligations total at least $36 trillion. Other estimates run even higher.
When Social Security began in 1935, most workers weren’t expected to live past the “retirement age” of 65. The program wasn’t supposed to have to pay off, except to widows, orphans and the odd male who somehow staggered to his gold watch.
Today, it’s a national retirement program — for an aging country whose life expectancy is pushing 80. In 1960, five workers supported a retiree; today, there are three, and that number falls to two in 2030. Yet the retirement age has failed to keep pace, slowly rising a couple of months a year for those born after 1938 and topping out at 67 for those born after 1960.
You do the math.
No wonder the trustees of the system themselves — including three Obama Cabinet officials — warned in their most recent report on the health of the entitlement system: “Projected long-run program costs for both Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable under currently scheduled financing, and will require legislative corrections if disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers are to be avoided.”
So even Team Obama realizes these programs must be put on a sound footing (and likely radically restructured) to continue.
Yet the president and the Democrats still refuse to put meaningful spending cuts on the table — and refuse completely to deal with the entitlement monster. Even though they know the numbers don’t work, they’re trying to lock in Obama’s sky-high spending as the new normal — and then up the ante.
The debt-ceiling cage match is the culmination of the Democrats’ 75-year-long fight to establish a voting bloc of dependents under the false flags of “compassion” and “social justice.” It’s sapped our strength, created a welfare mentality and, if unchecked, will reduce us to a nation of aging, resentful beggars with eyes cast permanently toward Washington.
The preamble to the Constitution talks about promoting the general welfare, not the welfare state. For the welfare state is incompatible with the rest of the preamble, which concludes: “and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” By definition, dependents are not free.
That’s why Republicans must stand firm in their demands for real spending cuts, not accounting tricks and vague promises. If the debt ceiling must be raised this go-around, it should be temporary — and rolled back as quickly as possible.
Because, unless we come to grips with spending now, there isn’t going to be a future.