The Crisis Nobody’s Talking About: America’s Entitlement Crunch
22nd October 2016
President Obama’s 2016 budget makes this brutal reality clear. Entitlements there already absorb almost 70 percent of all federal spending. Defense spending, the next-largest budget item, takes up about 15 percent of the total, while interest payments on outstanding government debt take up some 6 percent. That leaves only about 10 percent for all the rest of what Washington does, and nothing for walls, free college, new bridges and the like. Indeed, entitlements, which have already expanded from 56 percent of all federal spending in 2000 and from 43 percent twenty years ago, promise to intensify the pressure they place on the budget, as the retirement of the baby boom and the increased obligations under the Affordable Care Act disproportionately enlarge the demands on these programs year after year, without even a requirement that Congress vote on the matter.
The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. This is true even with a government that thinks that everybody’s money is at its disposal.