This post is all meat, no fat, no fluff. Its not an idealogical diatribe, its cold, hard facts, and then I say what I feel and ask a question.
This is the response, when The General Accounting Office's Head Comptroller was asked his assessment of our financial near future, it faults BOTH parties. Won't you give your opinion, after reading the facts, to whether we should be planning to spend 210 Billion, or 100 Billion, or 8 Billion, or 56 Billion in ADDITIONAL DEBT, added to the debt we can't afford, coming due?(The 4 numbers correspond with stated fiscal plans from the campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Mike Huckabee, respectively.)
"We can't afford to keep the promises we've already made, much less to be piling on top of them,' Comptroller General David Walker warned of the Medicare expansion passed by Congress and signed by President Bush.
As head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Walker presented projections prepared by his agency indicating that by 2040 the federal government will be able to 'pay interest on the mounting debt and some entitlement benefits' only.
The retirement of 78 million baby boomers means that the drug benefit will cost $8 trillion plus interest over the next 75 years, according to Walker, plus $20 trillion for the rest of Medicare.
Far from this being a scoop for CBS, it's actually nothing new for Walker to be diagnosing America with 'a fiscal cancer' as he calls it.
He has had his own traveling road show for some time, telling Rotary Clubs and other groups of the looming disaster. Those appearing at the side of the Clinton-appointed Walker — who is serving a 15-year term and thus has no fear of being fired — have included economists across the ideological spectrum.
Moreover, we were warned on good authority when Congress was considering the drug benefit of the foolishness of expanding what was already an entitlement monster.
'Republicans have abandoned the market-based reforms they tied to prescription drug coverage in the past,' cautioned economists Joseph Antos of the American Enterprise Institute and Jagadeesh Gokhale, now with the Cato Institute, months before the expansion was enacted into law.
'These reforms,' they wrote, 'were intended to introduce competition and choice into Medicare to reverse the spiral of heavy-handed regulation, ineffective price controls and runaway spending that have made Medicare a monument of cumbersome, bureaucratic health care — and a fiscal time bomb.'
Absent the original White House proposal's strong cost-saving incentives for competition, the unfunded future federal obligations of the measure Republicans embraced could cost as much as $12 trillion, the two economists warned.
They were right. And, typical of government programs, the cost overruns started right away. At the time of passage, the Congressional Budget Office forecast a cost of $409 billion through 2013. By early 2005, that had been upped to $720 billion.
That dwarfs the $70 billion in Medicare savings over five years in the president's latest budget. The CBO now expects combined outlays for Medicare and Medicaid 'to more than double by 2017, increasing by 124%, while nominal GDP is projected to grow only half as much, by 63%.'
In a 2005 study, Antos and Gokhale projected an economic growth rate about in line with our past experience through 2040. They then assumed much slower growth in spending. What they found was shocking: The government's unfunded liability totaled a whopping $21.9 trillion.
The Medicare trustees in 2005 estimated the unfunded portion of the cost as $18.2 trillion — or, as former Reagan and Bush I Treasury Department veteran Bruce Bartlett calculated it, '1.9% of the gross domestic product forever.'
And those estimates came from a Republican Congress and White House. Consider that Sen. Edward Kennedy before passage of the drug benefit in 2003 promised that it would be only 'a down payment,' and that Democrats would 'come back again and again and again and fight to make sure that we have a good program.'
When Medicare was enacted in 1965, we were assured by official projections that by 1990 its hospital coverage would cost only $9 billion; it turned out to be $66 billion. Now we're well into the trillions.
We know how to cure this fiscal cancer: free-market reform. And we have a nearly half-century-old practical model in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. It's time to find the guts to start operating on the patient.
Well, Liberals, can you give me (or anyone) a response for my facts? Well, not MY facts, but the Federal Comptroller, head of the Government Accounting Office? He was nominated by Reagan, RE-nominated by Bill Clinton, RE-nominated and all THREE times, almost Unanimously Confirmed by BOTH Parties in Senate and House Confirmation Hearings. The guy is smart. He KNOWS from where he speaks. And HE says that we, and our CHILDREN, and THEIR children, and THEIR children, etc., etc., are in a HEAP of trouble. We, as a Nation, will be BROKE. Or default on our loans, like a Third World Nation, and have no credit. Or maybe, just MAYBE, elect someone who will take this SERIOUSLY, like I have been trying to tell you, and STOP SPENDING MONEY OUR CHILDREN WON'T HAVE!!!!!!!. I can only assume that most of you Socialist Liberals have NO children. Because Left or Right, the parental love, the protecting instinct of ANY parent, is stronger than ideology. Stronger than just calling names. Stronger than bashing any Repiublican President. Well, at least I THOUGHT it was. Was I wrong? Tell me, please, I'm curious to know.
This is the response, when The General Accounting Office's Head Comptroller was asked his assessment of our financial near future, it faults BOTH parties. Won't you give your opinion, after reading the facts, to whether we should be planning to spend 210 Billion, or 100 Billion, or 8 Billion, or 56 Billion in ADDITIONAL DEBT, added to the debt we can't afford, coming due?(The 4 numbers correspond with stated fiscal plans from the campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Mike Huckabee, respectively.)
"We can't afford to keep the promises we've already made, much less to be piling on top of them,' Comptroller General David Walker warned of the Medicare expansion passed by Congress and signed by President Bush.
As head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Walker presented projections prepared by his agency indicating that by 2040 the federal government will be able to 'pay interest on the mounting debt and some entitlement benefits' only.
The retirement of 78 million baby boomers means that the drug benefit will cost $8 trillion plus interest over the next 75 years, according to Walker, plus $20 trillion for the rest of Medicare.
Far from this being a scoop for CBS, it's actually nothing new for Walker to be diagnosing America with 'a fiscal cancer' as he calls it.
He has had his own traveling road show for some time, telling Rotary Clubs and other groups of the looming disaster. Those appearing at the side of the Clinton-appointed Walker — who is serving a 15-year term and thus has no fear of being fired — have included economists across the ideological spectrum.
Moreover, we were warned on good authority when Congress was considering the drug benefit of the foolishness of expanding what was already an entitlement monster.
'Republicans have abandoned the market-based reforms they tied to prescription drug coverage in the past,' cautioned economists Joseph Antos of the American Enterprise Institute and Jagadeesh Gokhale, now with the Cato Institute, months before the expansion was enacted into law.
'These reforms,' they wrote, 'were intended to introduce competition and choice into Medicare to reverse the spiral of heavy-handed regulation, ineffective price controls and runaway spending that have made Medicare a monument of cumbersome, bureaucratic health care — and a fiscal time bomb.'
Absent the original White House proposal's strong cost-saving incentives for competition, the unfunded future federal obligations of the measure Republicans embraced could cost as much as $12 trillion, the two economists warned.
They were right. And, typical of government programs, the cost overruns started right away. At the time of passage, the Congressional Budget Office forecast a cost of $409 billion through 2013. By early 2005, that had been upped to $720 billion.
That dwarfs the $70 billion in Medicare savings over five years in the president's latest budget. The CBO now expects combined outlays for Medicare and Medicaid 'to more than double by 2017, increasing by 124%, while nominal GDP is projected to grow only half as much, by 63%.'
In a 2005 study, Antos and Gokhale projected an economic growth rate about in line with our past experience through 2040. They then assumed much slower growth in spending. What they found was shocking: The government's unfunded liability totaled a whopping $21.9 trillion.
The Medicare trustees in 2005 estimated the unfunded portion of the cost as $18.2 trillion — or, as former Reagan and Bush I Treasury Department veteran Bruce Bartlett calculated it, '1.9% of the gross domestic product forever.'
And those estimates came from a Republican Congress and White House. Consider that Sen. Edward Kennedy before passage of the drug benefit in 2003 promised that it would be only 'a down payment,' and that Democrats would 'come back again and again and again and fight to make sure that we have a good program.'
When Medicare was enacted in 1965, we were assured by official projections that by 1990 its hospital coverage would cost only $9 billion; it turned out to be $66 billion. Now we're well into the trillions.
We know how to cure this fiscal cancer: free-market reform. And we have a nearly half-century-old practical model in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. It's time to find the guts to start operating on the patient.
Well, Liberals, can you give me (or anyone) a response for my facts? Well, not MY facts, but the Federal Comptroller, head of the Government Accounting Office? He was nominated by Reagan, RE-nominated by Bill Clinton, RE-nominated and all THREE times, almost Unanimously Confirmed by BOTH Parties in Senate and House Confirmation Hearings. The guy is smart. He KNOWS from where he speaks. And HE says that we, and our CHILDREN, and THEIR children, and THEIR children, etc., etc., are in a HEAP of trouble. We, as a Nation, will be BROKE. Or default on our loans, like a Third World Nation, and have no credit. Or maybe, just MAYBE, elect someone who will take this SERIOUSLY, like I have been trying to tell you, and STOP SPENDING MONEY OUR CHILDREN WON'T HAVE!!!!!!!. I can only assume that most of you Socialist Liberals have NO children. Because Left or Right, the parental love, the protecting instinct of ANY parent, is stronger than ideology. Stronger than just calling names. Stronger than bashing any Repiublican President. Well, at least I THOUGHT it was. Was I wrong? Tell me, please, I'm curious to know.
