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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (935095)	5/15/2016 2:24:28 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Recommended By i-node Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574005

Its true that a lot of what makes for deficits (and thus indirectly debt levels, even more so for the debt because it includes previous deficits) is beyond the presidents control. In good economic times, a popular and powerful president, with the support of congress, can still for now (more so in the past) produce positive results here. But "good economic times" is itself something that the president can't simply control, and "support from congress", brings up the point that congress is important in government policy not just the president. Going forwards, the accumulated previous deficits, and even more so the programmed spending from entitlement programs, will more and more create a situation where solid fiscal results are difficult, then eventually impossible, without entitlement reform. It is true that the law for Social Security calls for payments to be cut as the nominal trust fund goes to zero. It only allows non Social Security taxes to pay for Social Security if they represent paying down the accounting debt the government owes itself, and after that other federal taxes are not supposed to be used. But 1 - If you don't reform things over time and just rely on the sudden adjustment built in to current law, you would have to make serious year over year cuts to the payments people get from Social Security. Probably something like a third year over year (and maybe additional smaller cuts after that, perhaps to as much as 50 percent). Such a sudden transition is probably bad policy in itself. More to the point of this post it probably is politically unsustainable. Older people vote, esp. when they are going to take a huge hit on government benefits. And the number of older people is growing. There would probably be a revision of the law before this sudden cut happened, if not there would probably be a revision after the people who allowed it to happen where voted out of office. 2 - I don't think Medicare and Medicaid have a similar built in restriction. Federal health spending in general is already larger than Social Security spending, and eventually Medicare spending alone will be. Federal medical spending is set on a trajectory to cause a fiscal crisis (at least when also considering interest on the debt) even if defense is cut and Social Security is reformed in such a way as to reign in the projected expansion in spending. --------------- heritage.org