Entitlement
Mentality
By Jacob
Sullum
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
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If you forgot to get a Christmas present for Charlie Rangel, don't worry. The congressman picked one out for himself, and he's sending you the bill: $2 million for a shiny new Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College.
The New York Democrat's Monument to Me was one of about 9,000 earmarks in the omnibus spending bill Congress approved before going on vacation. Most represented a more subtle form of self-aggrandizement, aimed at maintaining power and prestige by currying favor with voters.
So-called entitlement
programs are the reason "America faces escalating deficit levels
and debt burdens that could swamp our ship of state," as
Comptroller General David Walker put it in a recent speech. Social
Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for 40 percent of federal
spending and are expected to consume 51 percent in a decade.
Right now, Social
Security makes the federal fiscal picture look better than it really
is since the program generates a surplus that masks the true size of
the deficit. In fiscal year 2007, for example, the official budget
deficit was $163 billion; excluding the Social Security surplus, it
was more than twice as high.
Since the government
spends the surplus on other programs, the Social Security "trust
fund" consists entirely of federal bonds, and those IOUs will
come due soon. The oldest baby boomers become eligible for early
retirement in 2008. They will start drawing Medicare benefits in three
years.
The result, said
Walker, will be a "tsunami of spending" that "will
never recede." Under current law, the estimated gap between the
benefits retirees have been promised and revenue to fund them is $53 trillion,
of which $34 trillion is due to Medicare.
Nearly one-quarter of
that long-term Medicare deficit, $8 trillion, is attributable to the
prescription-drug benefit championed by President Bush and approved by
a Republican-controlled Congress. "Incredibly," Walker
noted, "this number was not disclosed or discussed until after
the Congress had voted on the bill and the president had signed it
into law." He said the bill's passage "arguably represents
government 'truth' and 'transparency' at its worst."
Not that the
Democrats, who criticized the drug benefit as insufficiently generous,
are any better. If you believe a Democratic president would be more
fiscally responsible than Bush, have a look at the campaign ad that
presents "Universal Health Care," "Alternative
Energy," "Middle Class Tax Breaks" and "Universal
Pre-K" as Christmas gifts lovingly wrapped by a beneficent
Hillary Clinton. Unlike Charlie Rangel, at least Clinton wants to buy
gifts for us, but she's still using our money.
"Our government
has made a whole lot of promises that, in the long run, it cannot
possibly keep without huge tax increases," Walker noted. Yet
Clinton is making even more promises, and she proposes to do it all
while cutting taxes.
I think I prefer
Rangel's grandiosity. It's a lot cheaper
Jacob Sullum is a
senior editor at Reason magazine and a contributing columnist on
Townhall.com.
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