When the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released their original estimate of President Obama’s Budget , they said it was going to be expensive: in ten years the President would accumulate over $9 trillion in deficits. Turns out, that was low-balling it. In their original estimate, CBO assumed that interest rates would be held constant. This makes modeling the costs a bit easier, but makes little economic sense. In reality, as annual deficits are piled onto the national debt, any rational person (or foreign government) debating whether or not to …
Two days into the new Congress, the majority has signaled they are unlikely to take their promise of fiscal discipline seriously. House democrats have turned off the Medicare trigger under the rules package for the 111th Congress, which means they are unlikely to even debate entitlement policy, let alone engage in necessary reforms. The
Most people are skeptical about statistics, claiming that mathematically-minded people just bend numbers to their will. But when it comes to long term budget projections, economists from the left, right, and center all agree we on an unsustainable course, and that the entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—are the main driver of the problem. One more testimony to this fact was recently released by the chief accountant of the US Government, the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Like the Congressional Budget Office and the Social Security and Medicare Trustees, GAO finds that …
When it comes to retirement and pension benefits, federal, state, and local government officials have all been humming the same mantra: never pay for something today if you can put off paying for it until tomorrow. Unfortunately, tomorrow is here. The federal government is on the hook for $41 trillion in unfunded obligations for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and state and local governments owe an additional $1.5 trillion to their state employees for health and pension benefits. The national reality of these promises started hitting home this year when …
