Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Facing the Reality on Entitlements in the U.S. and its fiscal burden

Recommendable! Much has been written about entitlements and how they bankrupt countries. 

There is a strong advocacy for ever expanding government entitlements like it was manna raining from heaven. When dystopia and utopia meet!

Based on the forecast of the CBO for the next 10 years, the annual deficits of the federal budget are going to remain very high and unsustainable. Federal government spending at almost 25% of the whole economy is way too high!!!

E.g. Medicare should be reformed ASAP. It should be e.g. means tested instead of universal entitlement at age 65. That such a socialist program ever passed the U.S. Congress and was signed into law by President Johnson in 1965 is still horrifying! Too many politicians in Washington DC were out of their mind!!!

"A new Congressional Budget Office report confirms that Washington’s financial prospects are dire. Even while making generous assumptions about inflation and interest rates, these government economists and statisticians anticipate that federal spending will continue to outpace revenues well into the twenty-first century, creating historically large annual deficits and adding to the nation’s accumulation of public debt. By 2032, they forecast, outstanding government debt will stand at 110 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), and by 2052, that figure will reach 185 percent ...
Past decisions have made this forecast all but inevitable. More than anything, the growth of entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—has caused spending to exceed revenues, creating outsize deficits and a mounting debt burden. ...
With this history in mind, the CBO may have taken too optimistic a tack in its calculations. For instance, it assumes that defense spending will hold steady at about 3.5 percent of GDP—but mounting geopolitical pressures seem likely to drive some expansion in defense outlays. On entitlements, too, forecasters show signs of optimism, predicting that spending will go up at something close to the historical pace—yet several considerations suggest that it may accelerate. For example, the government has decided to continue subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, even though they were set to expire. These will accumulate over time. As of late June, President Biden was considering forgiving student debt, or at least a portion of it. This would constitute a new entitlement. ..."

"... CBO projects that the federal budget deficit will shrink to $1.0 trillion in 2022 (it was $2.8 trillion last year) and that the annual shortfall would average $1.6 trillion from 2023 to 2032. The deficit continues to decrease as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) next year as spending related to the coronavirus pandemic wanes, but then deficits increase, reaching 6.1 percent of GDP in 2032. The deficit has been greater than that only six times since 1946 ...
Outlays are projected to average 23 percent of GDP over that period, a level high by historical standards, boosted by rising interest costs and greater spending for programs that provide benefits to elderly people ...
Relative to the size of the economy, federal debt held by the public is projected to dip over the next two years, to 96 percent of GDP in 2023, and to rise thereafter. In CBO’s projections, it reaches 110 percent of GDP in 2032 (higher than it has ever been) and 185 percent of GDP in 2052 ..."

Facing Reality on Entitlements | City Journal A Congressional Budget Office report leaves no doubt about the cause of the nation’s crushing debt burden.

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