JEFFREY CARTER: What Is The Problem?
70% of the budget that is now $33 trillion in deficit is pre-planned mandatory spending that no one in Washington has the standing to stop. Like a kudzu plant, it grows every year and you can’t kill it. It’s hard to even slow down or trim.
Venture capitalist Mary Meeker used to identify that in her slide presentations about the future of the internet.
We can squabble all we want. We can make our talking points. We can go on TV and play “gotcha” with the other party every single day. You know what? Every single day the budget deficit gets bigger because no single Senator or Representative will do anything about the 70% of the budget that grows every year and is bankrupting us.
It’s not the defense budget. It’s entitlements. It’s transfer payments. It’s programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, EBT/SNAP, and programs like that. I always hear the refrain “We are the richest country in the world and in human history but we can’t seem to take care of our poor”. I have news for you, no government can.
You don’t want a government to take care of the poor either. The end result is a totalitarian society with no free speech and no way out.
With the absolute breakdown of the family unit and the poor economic incentives in place because of the US government programs that seek to take care of the poor, we get more poor people who are more desperate than before.
I’m beginning to feel that only some sort of collapse will address the problem. I don’t think you can solve a problem from within a system that created, and is sustained by, that problem. I hope I’m wrong, and that we muddle through somehow.
h/t Glenn Reynolds