As long as the government doesn't spend trillions on fighting endless wars in the ME, while making it difficult for immigrants to become citizens, then over funding an agency to crack down on immigrants while claiming there is some sort of invasion, all the while cutting taxes for the super wealthy.
You could zero out the Pentagon tomorrow and still have to confront the welfare-state arithmetic. Social Security and Medicare alone cost vastly more than defense.
Serious attempts to analyze the budget with the goal of addressing over-spending generally omit Social Security, because it's paid for with a dedicated tax. Repealing Social Security entirely wouldn't do much to address the budget deficit, certainly nowhere near as much as naive "look at how bit that part of this pie graph is!" analyses suggest it would.
Because the social security surplus was used to fund the treasury instead of being put towards social security. The 1990s budget surplus that became the Bush tax cuts? Yeah that was the money that was supposed to pay for social security.
Surprising. Is that something common in Econ literature or something? It's definitely not the norm in poli sci journals, unless something's changed in the decade or so since I looked at many of those, since it just crowds out and distorts things that do contribute to the deficit.
It does hold government debt, but that's not really useful and puts it in a totally different category from "spending that contributes to the budget deficit".
1. AIUI even undocumented people use fake Social Security numbers to work. They thus pay Social Security and Medicare taxes without getting any benefits.
2. Social Security is effed because of its structure - current workers pay for current retirees - and the inverting population pyramid. This is unrelated to who the workers are.
Since 2001 the US has spent 29.7 Trillion on entitlements excluding social security vs 18 Trillion of military spending.
Of course the entitlements are useful spending - these are things people need and benefit from. Had these dollars not been spent by the US government, they would have been spent directly by the taxpayers for the same goods and services. While some money may have been saved if this spending were private, it probably wouldn't change the total economic impact by much.
On the other hand we have nothing to show for the $18 trillion burned on wars that went horrifically. If we'd put that money into useful investments such that it paid interest and stopped our defense spending, we would be running a $300 billion per year surplus right now with no cuts to any other government services, to say nothing of the potential economic advantages if the wars had just never happened.
And don't get me started on the $10 trillion lost to the Bush tax cuts and their extensions.
> 29.7 Trillion on entitlements excluding social security
Convenient to exclude SS for ... no reason other than it makes your numbers look better because its a vast majority of entitlement spending so it makes your argument look bad.
May I ask you provide numbers including all entitlement spending, which includes SS?
This is what I meant by knowing what the numbers are.
The purpose of my response was that using Friedman's quote was hypocritical when expensive wars are fought and taxes on the wealthy are cut (a point ignored). It's also unclear to what extend the undocumented are a burden on the welfare state in relation to the above. The current party in power, with the exception of Senator Rand Paul, seem remarkably unconcerned with the $40 trillion deficit.
SAVE - Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_Alien_Verification_...