And how might we pay for such absurd obligations? Here’s Cembalest:
* By 2020, the average EU country would need to raise its tax rate to 55 percent of national income to pay promised benefits
* The U.S. could fund its shortfall by doubling the 15.3 percent payroll tax on employers and employees (forever)
* Alternatively, the U.S. could reduce discretionary spending by 80%, on things like education, defense and environmental protection. Why so high? There’s not enough discretionary spending left (the OMB estimates that mandatory spending will make up 71% of government expenditures by 2016)
* Of course, the other option would be the printing press (inflation), which would be worse given how much would be needed
Every man, woman and child for his/her self.
We have absolutely got to get over the notion that there are certain programs that can’t be cut. I am close to Social Security/Medicare age, but they have got to be on the chopping block along with every other social program. We should be slashing everywhere. Start with the Departmment of Education, which I would get rid of altogether, and then slash and burn HHS and move on down the list. There are way too many nice to have things like ETV and NEA, that we simply can’t afford and sacred goat programs like Head Start that simply don’t work. Its time for some tough love.
Any thing that cannot continue, will not continue.What we’re seeing is the approaching natural endpoint of the social-democrat welfare state because we are, to quote Dame Thatcher, “run[ning] out of other peoples’ money.”
Do you really think that an increasingly brown cadre of productive young people will tolerate having their future completely hamstrung to pay for a bunch of irresponsible white folks to continue living in the style to which they had become accustomed?
Resources [i]will[/i] be shifted away from the old to the young, because we simply cannot do both. We Baby Boomers can fight it for awhile, but it isn’t a fight we should undertake, and we’d lose it anyhow.
One big shift coming (within the decade, I would guess) is that for a wide range of programs the “entitlement” will go away, and instead the truly needy will be [i]authorized[/i] to receive such benefits. For example, it is absolute idiocy (and fantasy) to believe that we can or should cover medical expenses for ‘children’ up to age 30 in families with up to 400% of poverty-level income.
Perhaps more importantly, the only path to maintaining halfway serious assistance to the truly needy is for governments at all levels to get out of the way and stop strangling the economy with countless and usually pointless regulations. Do we really need over 28,000 words of regulations — and three levels of bureaucrats — to define what constitutes an acceptable [i]CABBAGE[/i]?
The type and magnitude of regulations arising from the last three administrations — but most especially the current one — are choking off the business and employment growth we must have if there is to be any hope of working our way through this entitlement dilemma.
It will also be impossible for younger generations to build their retirement if we insist on maintaining a 40% corporate tax rate (second highest in the world) and then taxing individual dividend income a second time at what is scheduled to become nearly the same rate. Those big, bad corporations are primarily owned by retirees, pension funds, and savers.
Bottom line: the social-democrat left cannot keep both their entitlement programs [i]and[/i] their stultifying economic regulations plus the bloated bureaucracy required to enforce them.
Both are necessary to some degree, but (again in both cases) probably at levels roughly one-fifth of those currently prevailing.
It’s good to finally have the end of this socialist oppression in sight. The constant theft of my earnings could have been used to save for my family’s future. I don’t hold out hope that I will ever be refunded all the money stolen from my family by government and then redistributed, but I can dream of a day when the theft finally stops. And if they want to inflate away the debt…go ahead! I triple dog dare them. My house will be paid off long before then and my precious metals will be worth a mint!
You know, God said that he hates dishonest scales.
The LORD abhors dishonest scales,
but accurate weights are his delight. Pr. 11:1
The LORD detests differing weights,
and dishonest scales do not please him. Pr. 20:23
That is what this fiat currency (inflating debt certificates) and these socialist redistributions of wealth have been.
What does God think about governments that rob the working class through things like Social Security?
” ‘Do not defraud your neighbor or rob him.
” ‘Do not hold back the wages of a hired man overnight. Lev. 19:13