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Can somebody answer this question for me? Is it food stamps, medicare, medicaid, or social security?
Defense and security from the boogyman.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hnsq
We also have a problem of SS being an inherently poor program to begin with. Its returns are several percentage points behind market returns, even in the worst economy. Additionally, the program was never designed to be a retirement plan, which is how most Americans use it today. We also let people retire entirely too early. We live over a decade longer today than we did when SS was started, and the retirement age has not been bumped up to compensate for that.
Wasn't a poor program to begin with. It wasn't altered to keep up with a changing world. But you get it right with it not being designed as a retirement program and us living longer.
Can somebody answer this question for me? Is it food stamps, medicare, medicaid, or social security?
The one and only real driver of our debt is the fact that politicians are totally incapable of restraining their spending. When they've maxed out what they can confiscate in taxes, they simply issue bonds, borrow money, and have the Fed print more (devaluing the currency). In fact, it is impossible for any real limits to be placed on government spending when government can confiscate income and place endless taxes. There are hundreds of billions wasted on pork, graft, fraud, corruption, corporate welfare, etc., but none of that will EVER be cut. Instead, when faced with political pressure to put tiny limits on the growth of spending, politicians will cut the tiny fraction of 1% of government spending that citizens can see--Air Traffic Controllers, and National Parks for instance.
You cannot point to specific government programs and say "these are the biggest driver of debt"--because the problem is government officials refusing to prioritize spending and cut the stuff at the bottom. Remember the "guns versus butter" discussion in world history, where some governments focused the bulk much of their spending on wars, while others primarily spent to make sure the citizenry was properly fed? Forget that. Now, government leaders simply max out spending on EVERYTHING, until the nation goes bankrupt (Greece) and/or the fiat currency collapses (Weimar Germany).
What you can do is identify which are the biggest portions of the total budget, because the higher the spending, the more opportunity for waste, inefficiency, fraud and graft.
As to the 4 programs mentioned, food stamps is the only one not covered by a dedicated tax. Consequently, those who get food stamps did not pay for those benefits specifically; in fact, those who get them are unlikely to pay any income tax at all. But all federal "safety net" programs combined make up only 12% of the federal budget (Policy Basics: Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go? — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities).
Social Security comprises 22% of the federal budget. Social Security and Medicaid are paid for with a dedicated payroll tax of 12.4% (note that calling half the "employer's share" does not change the fact that it ALL comes out of the employee's wages). Being a Ponzi Scam, Social Security would have been a huge driver of debt with the retirement of the Baby Boom, and Washington foresaw this problem. Significant SS tax increases and benefit cuts were made 1983, and between then and 2010 about $2.7 trillion in EXTRA Social Security taxes were collected (over and above what was needed to fund benefits). Of course, our grossly corrupt leaders spent the $2.7 trillion on other things (like pointless foreign wars), and put worthless IOUs in the SS Trust Fund while calling them "securities" in the hopes citizens were too stupid to remember the $2.7 trillion supposedly in the Trust Fund when the time came to pay for the retirement of the Baby Boom.
Since American taxpayers ALREADY paid for the retirement of the Baby Boom once, I don't think it's fair to call Social Security/Medicare a driver of debt AT ALL. We could say that the politicians that stole the SS Trust Fund money and spent it on other things are a significant driver of debt, though.
Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program) in total account for another 21% of the federal budget. Medicare has a dedicated tax of 2.9% plus .9% of income over $200,000. Again, these are significant costs that will increase with the retirement of the Baby Boom--but the Baby Boom paid dearly for these benefits over a lifetime of working.
I would say that our insanely oversized military budget--19% of the federal budget with an unknown amount of spending hidden in other departments like the Department of State--is by far the best thing to cut in the future as the time comes to support the Baby Boom in return for the incomprehensible amount of money they sent to government in taxes. There is no need for us to continue to incite terrorism and try to police the world, and certainly no need for a nation that has open-door immigration to continue to spend more on military operations than the rest of the world's nations combined. With a $17 trillion dollar debt that can only be dealt with by devaluing the currency (meaning your wages and savings), and with the majority of citizens (both Republican and Democrat) support large cuts in military spending, it makes NO sense that Obama continues even more ridiculous military spending than even the war-mongering Bush.
If the three choices you present represent a multiple choice question, then I would have to say none of the above. There is a much more complex, systemic dysfunction in how all of us spend our money in this country, and that includes our collective self, i.e. government.
But the more I overspend the deeper in debt I get.
I haven't quite figured out the problem yet.
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