I'm not sure about 'quadrillions', <g>, after all --- it becomes an impossibility to tax at a rate of more then 100%.
No need to do that.
The programs could continue over centuries. And noticed I said in nominal dollars, with inflation (so each dollar is worth less) combined with economic growth (so that there is more real dollars), combined with continued pay outs over very long periods of time, quadrillions of dollars spent on the programs is indeed possible. In fact it might not even be a low number of quadrillions. The cost of those two programs is already around a trillion a year (and thats not even adding Medicaid). When measured in nominal dollars the growth in both programs is strong (esp. Medicaid). Total payouts could easily exceed a quadrillion dollars in less than a century, you might even have payouts of a quadrillion per year in a couple of centuries (or less if inflation picks up). $1 dollar in $1907 was worth the same as $22.80 in 2007. (according to westegg.com ) So 22.8 times higher prices in 100 years. If that continues for 2 more centuries 1 dollar today will be worth over $500 200 years from now. Since current payouts are about a trillion per year, you only need a real dollar increase of 2X in two centuries to get a quadrillion dollars a year. Toss in Medicaid and any other existing or new entitlements, figure (realistically) that real growth will be much higher than the rate in the above calculation, and run higher inflation that before (which is quite possible) and we could see a quadrillion per year (in nominal dollar terms) in one century.
Now that figure isn't going to be born by the tax payers now alive (unless we extend life spans by a great amount do to some medical breakthrough), and the real dollar cost, and percentage of GDP are both much more important measures than the nominal dollar costs. But the extreme figure does highlight the open ended nature of the program, and how the idea that "such programs are easily affordable if we get out of Iraq now", is silly. Iraq is a rounding error, and perhaps not even much of a rounding error, compared to the future costs of these programs. Even if you use more normal time frames for considering long term issues (multiple decades not multiple centuries), and you use real dollar costs rather than nominal, the expense still dwarfs Iraq (or even WWII in real dollar terms) |
