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On Getting Serious
I spent yesterday afternoon debating spending and the deficit with some fellow local Republicans. My view on the subject is really quite simple: Cut it all. There is no program, no department, so sacred that it shouldn’t be cut in some fashion.
That said, we have to talk about the Big Three: Social Security, Medicare, and the military. These three spending categories together represented 74 percent of federal spending in 2015, according to these guys. If you are going to do something about the $500 billion in overspending, you have to do something in these three areas. Period. It’s just math.
Now, in my discussions with my fellow Republicans, very few have agreed with me. They say cut foreign aid (1 percent), or cut the EPA and USDA (~4 percent combined). One person offered up a list of eight wasteful programs that combined make up about $20 million in spending. But cut Social Security? Medicare? Hello no!
This brings me to my point. One of the people I was discussing this with said he was fed up with Washington for not getting serious about dealing with the deficit. Even here on Ricochet I see folks angry that none of the presidential candidates are talking about dealing with the deficit. Folks, they aren’t serious, because we aren’t serious. And until we are ready to take a hatchet to our sacred cows, we won’t be serious. And it’s time we got serious.
(Note: I’m not being sarcastic.)
Published in Domestic Policy, Economics, General, Military
I fear you’re in a very small minority.
Oh, I know that I am (perhaps even in a minority of one) – but I am also of the opinion that within my lifetime that is where we will end up anyway.
Our entitlement schemes as currently constituted cannot continue forever. So they won’t.
The F-35 is the last manned fighter. I will own that statement.
At one point I was willing to give up 10% of my Social Security, but only after the Federal government proved for several years that they would balance the budget, cut wasteful spending, and quit giving money away to people who never earned it.
Now I am retired and expect to get back the 14% of my earnings that I and my employers paid on my behalf for the last 40 years. My life will definitely change without receiving MY money back. So why shouldn’t others lives change as well? I have been lied to in the past…cheated in the past…robbed in the past, yet my wife and I still survive. We live comfortably because we live prudently. I am tired of having to take the responsibility for what others have screwed up–for how others have lived so irresponsibly.
Our representatives voted in 2009 to spend 890 billion dollars on a “stimulus” which than became part of the baseline budget. Where did that money go? Not to me. If I give up some of my Social Security, it will simply be wasted by hacks in D.C. who have a guaranteed lifetime pension. Thanks and no thanks.
I’ve always thought that the picking of programs to cut was as much a mistake as picking which companies and programs to subsidize- it immediately sets off a never ending game of posturing that your program is sacred.
My idea has always been: 1%. Cut EVERYTHING by 1%. Social Security, Medicare, Defense, EPA, Education, everything. No one is special. But let the departments decide how to achieve the savings- they can have a hiring freeze, reduce payments, not refurbish their office, don’t buy any F-35s and restart the greatest airborne weapons program ground troops have ever seen, the A-10. Whatever it takes, but everyone gets a 1% haircut. I believe it’s the only politically viable way to get the votes.
And next year, do it again.
Paul Ryan has been proposing & refining reform plans for both SS & Medicare that would both move them in free-market directions & extend solvency, and he gets called a RINO by some of us & a Grandma killer by the leftists. Spin’s essential point is exactly right, and some people have been working the problem, but can’t get attention due to the “TRUMP ALL THE TIME” media squirrel.
That’s my view as well.
I guess I’m a bleeding heart then.
Shutdown all the aid programs, but open up a dormitory in every city where you can get three hots and a cot. And not “good” food either. Gruel.
It should be unpleasant to be on the government dole. If private organizations want to provide better they can.
My personal plan if I ever get in really bad shape is to fall back on my family (or they fall back on me).
I don’t understand how Medicare works, but the abuse and waste has got to be horrific.
I’ve had to twice step in and stop doctors from doing unnecessary tests on my mother. A friend had to threaten to sue a doctor who was attempting to do a colonoscopy on her hospitalized dying 90 year old friend, who died the next day.
Meanwhile a friend of my mother’s, in her 80s with a heart condition, is getting booted out of a rehab facility while still very ill.
We seem to be simultaneously suffering from too much healthcare and not enough.
Please don’t misunderstand that I have any answers. I don’t. But I look towards the last third of my life with a lot of apprehension.
Means testing social security completely destroys the illusion that it is something you pay into and receive in retirement .Why should the “rich” pay into social security if they are to receive none of the insurance back when they retire?
I thought of that too, Jamie. But then I thought of unemployment insurance. I’ve paid into that all my life and never taken advantage. And God willing, same with disability.
You will end up with a lot of people being paid, and absolutely nothing being done for it. Because when budgets get cut, the people prioritize their jobs over what their jobs are for.
Cut the SS benefit’s COLA. Identify the highest cost Medicare procedures and subject them to meaningful co-pays or limits. (FWIW I’m 64)
Defense? If we don’t get that right, nothing else matters.
Taking a hatchet to sacred cows is, at best, a whack-a-mole game. (Heh-heh.) A hatchet’s the wrong tool.
A better approach is to install a set of incentive mechanisms that continuously reduce spending.
The current incentive mechanism can be summarized as, “Free money! Yay! No limit! And no one cares how we spend it! Yay!”
So we need the opposite of that.
One mechanism would be to not allow congressmen to run for reelection if the budget wasn’t balanced.
Another mechanism would be to require all government programs to publish a publicly available report card, and the citizenry could plainly see what they’re getting for their money.
Another mechanism would be if the bureaucratic paperwork to hire a government employee was more difficult than the paperwork to fire one.
Another mechanism would be all government employment had a specific time limit.
There are many possibilities.
One area of Social Security that I think could be cut, though I don’t know the impact.
Why do minor children get a check when their parent retires? My (somewhat) wealthy friend applied for SS at 65. She was surprised when her son also got a check for about $1,000, which he received every month until he turned 18. Her husband is younger and was still working.
Here is one: Offer any private company the option to grab US government work for 80% of the government expenditure, with the contractual requirement to match the performance metrics.
It is sort of like making government work up for grabs as if it was Charter Schools.
I think that is a good question. That is why I support substantially raising the retirement age and still treating all those eligible equally.
I know neither of those ideas are popular, but agree with your opinion here about means testing.
As long as we don’t have to hire 100 bureaucrats to oversee the company!
But its there when you need it.
Ok. So we treat SS the same. But don’t you think that would inspire a disincentive to prepare for retirement? Why sacrifice to put money in an IRA if your SS is going to be reduced when your means are tested?
No one really wants to admit the truth about Social Security – every penny you’ve paid in has been spent already.
Yep. Stop saying “It’s my money!” No it isn’t. Your money was spent years ago. Now you are spending my money.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t realize that Austin. It’s been talked about since I was in my 20s thirty years ago.
How about offering people a payoff: take X amount now and forgo any SS in the future?
The system as it stands now is terribly unfair; from what I understand especially to minorities who typically go to work earlier, pay into SS longer and die younger.
I would willingly and happily forgo any SS in my future (not said lightly, the last 10 years has taken a real toll on my family financially) but ONLY if my four children were exempt from having to contribute to SS for the rest of their lives.
Too many people will take the money now, spend it, then complain and get news stories done about them when they’re penniless in their old age.
Until we as a society are ready to let people really suffer for their bad decisions, we’re screwed.
That’s the other side of this coin, for sure. I submit that because there is a safety net, people don’t take the time to plan for their future and their retirement. It’s get all you can, and can all you get. If they knew they’d work until the dropped, or live on the street, they’s maybe do something different.
Paul Ryan made serious and significant proposals to reform Social Security and Medicare. Yet he’s lately been criticized by many here at Ricochet as a RINO squish and a sellout. They say that he’s part of the “establishment” that they apparently hate.
I find this very unfair and unwarranted.
Hear hear!
Perhaps there’s some middle ground here. I agree that any politician who intimates that the only possible reason a man could be poor is a character failing (to wit, the failing of lack of foresight involved in his failure to invest wisely and save prudently) will never be electable. But I submit that he shouldn’t be electable, because this is a cruel sentiment. The belief that one’s wealth measures one’s character is, I reckon, a species of Protestant heresy. Some people are poor because of bad luck, or lack of natural aptitude for the skills required to function in a modern economy, or even because of their unusually good character: duty to family can make it very hard to advance economically if, for example, many members of the family need full-time care owing to their age (young or old) or their physical or mental handicap.
I do think a politician could be elected, or at least, I hope one could, with the argument that few people in America are genuinely unemployable and facing destitution absent the receipt of money from the government, that right now, sixty percent of American households are receiving money from the government, and that this simply isn’t economically sustainable. It makes no sense to believe that sixty percent of the American population would be unable to survive without taking anyone else’s money. Most Americans are able-bodied. I think this is a message people can understand.
I do suspect the message, “If you’re destitute, it’s your own fault, you fool,” is not apt to be a political winner.
The solution is “that is the states’ responsibility”.
It’s true to the Constitution, it reduces federal spending, it allows for a diversity of approaches, and it provides an incentive to chose the most cost effective solution.
Politicians don’t have political will to anything until the voters want them. Bush tried with Social Security, he got push back from both sides so fast he got whiplash. Gosh, 72% on big entitlements and welfare programs. We are doomed.