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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (8553)	5/27/2009 3:14:25 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

Yes entitlements are the monster of the budget, esp. if you include interest on the debt as an entitlement as it sometimes is. If you include interest and add in all the other programs its something like 60% of government spending, and its growing faster than the rest. Military spending trends down as portion of government spending or the economy, non-military non-entitlement spending has had its growth restricted, but the constraints on spending in those areas are likely to be overwhelmed by the built in increases in entitlements. Over time we will not only get a crowing out of other government spending, we are also likely to get government too large as a percentage of the economy even with a rather severe crowing out of other spending. And even both of those things are likely to be enough. We're likely to have too high of taxes, a crowd out of non-entitlement spending AND difficulty meeting the demands of entitlement spending all together. Considering all of that I'd say that entitlement spending is set up to be to high and needs to be cut, but politically that's extremely difficult. I suppose we could be bailed out of some of this problem by an extraordinary level of sustained economic growth, but I don't consider that to be very likely.