After reading the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial on April 23, "Are we there yet? $20 trillion right around the corner," you are 100 percent right.
Just look at the "trust funds" that run out of money one after another: 2021--Highway Trust Fund; 2023 Social Security Disability Trust Fund; 2025--Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund; 2030--Social Security Trust Fund.
Still not convinced? Think of it this way.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, this year we will spend 81 percent of every dollar the federal government takes in on mandatory spending (principally Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security) and interest on the debt. If we do nothing, by 2027 we will be spending 99 percent of every dollar of revenue the federal government takes in on just this mandatory spending and interest.
Now what does that mean?
It means every dollar we spend on the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Homeland Security so that we will be militarily safe; and every dollar we spend on education, infrastructure and high-value-added research so that we will be economically secure and competitive in today's knowledge based global economy will have to be borrowed, and much of that will have to be borrowed from foreign countries, many of whom aren't great friends of ours. And deficits will exceed over $1.4 trillion a year.
You say unsustainable! I say absolutely. It's just arithmetic.
Soluble? You bet. But our politicians in both parties, in the White House and Congress, are going to have to make some politically hard decisions.
And if they don't, the simple arithmetic shows that we will face the most predictable economic crisis in history, and that my generation of Americans will be the first generation of Americans to leave the country worse off than we found it.
Unsustainable, yes! Let's also hope it's unacceptable to the American people.
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Erskine Bowles was head of the Small Business Administration, White House Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton, head of the University of North Carolina university system, and an author of the Simpson-Bowles proposal to address the federal deficits and escalating national debt.
Editorial on 04/28/2017