Comptroller General David Walker estimates that Washington has promised $53 trillion in Social Security and Medicare benefits without funding them. In real dollars, that means every American — this means you — owns a $175,000 share of the federal debt. It’s as if you have a second mortgage — for a home you don’t own.
These days, there has been much finger-pointing at a system that allowed lenders to issue mortgages that violated the basic tenets of fiscal responsibility. How is it, people now ask, that banks could issue so many loans to buyers for homes they could not afford?
How indeed? Washington continues to authorize retirement and medical benefits without putting aside the money to pay for them. Editorials and think tanks sound the alert. Yet you hear little public complaint about the situation. Even in a presidential election year, voters are not demanding that White House hopefuls promise to balance the books.
If the sky falls, will Americans then ask why they were not warned? Every year of inaction adds another $2 trillion to $3 trillion to the tab, noted Alison Acosta Fraser of the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.
Alice Rivlin of the left-leaning Brookings Institution is the fourth member of the Concord Coalition’s “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour.” Asked what presidential hopefuls Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain propose to do about the pending crisis, Rivlin answered that essentially “they’re ignoring it almost completely.”