The Warnings Have Been Around for Years

The numbers are huge, the kind of numbers that make “people sweat.”

 

Erie County’s liability? Nearly $1 billion. Buffalo’s price tag? At least that much. Probably more.

For the first time, taxpayers are learning the bottom line: long-term costs they will pay to provide health insurance to government retirees, a public employee benefit that has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years.

And that’s just for city and county government.

It isn’t just the cost of health benefits, you also have to include the costs of all benefits and salaries. All the costs are symptomatic of Government Gone Wild with salaries, benefits and the size of government itself.

Anyone who believes that this is a sudden problem has been living with their head in the sand. Libertarians and many economists have been issuing these dire warnings for years. The majority of voters and politicians continue to believe in the Government Gravy Train.

It pisses me off seeing articles like this, not because of the article itself, because the whole situation has been aided and abetted by stupidity and greed. YES, this is a RANT!

Congressman Ron Paul, Texas (R), put out his weekly Texas Straight Talk column today entitled The Coming Entitlement Meltdown. Congressman Paul has been warning about this problem for many years.

The Medicare “trust fund” is already badly in the red, and the only solution will be a dramatic increase in payroll taxes for younger workers. The National Taxpayers Union reports that Medicare will consume nearly 40% of the nation’s GDP after several decades because of the new drug benefit. That’s not 40% of federal revenues, or 40% of federal spending, but rather 40 % of the nation’s entire private sector output!

The official national debt figure, now approaching $9 trillion, reflects only what the federal government owes in current debts on money already borrowed. It does not reflect what the federal government has promised to pay millions of Americans in entitlement benefits down the road. Those future obligations put our real debt figure at roughly fifty trillion dollars- a staggering sum that is about as large as the total household net worth of the entire United States. Your share of this fifty trillion amounts to about $175,000.

Don’t believe for a second that we can grow our way out of the problem through a prosperous economy that yields higher future tax revenues. If present trends continue, by 2040 the entire federal budget will be consumed by Social Security and Medicare alone. The only options for balancing the budget would be cutting total federal spending by about 60%, or doubling federal taxes. To close the long-term entitlement gap, the U.S. economy would have to grow by double digits every year for the next 75 years.

Ron Paul based his column today on the 60 Minutes segment featuring David Walker, Comptroller General of the U.S. General Accountability Office. The first half of the segment is in the video below. If you want to watch the whole segment from 60 Minutes, go here.

There are only two ways out of this current crisis: 1. Increase taxes dramatically, while lowering the quality of life; or, 2. Drastically cut the size and scope of government. The Great Society of LJB, started by FDR’s New Deal, is going to turn into the Great Demise if we continue to follow the present course.

Currently, there is only one Presidential hopeful for 2008 that has a plan to deal with the coming fiscal crisis. That person is Congressman Ron Paul. He is not your typical Republican. The Constitution has vested the power for change in the hands of the voters. You can support Ron Paul, a smaller government and promote self-responsibility, or you can wallow in huge tax increases by voting for the members of the Status Quo. That list includes Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Al Gore, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Barak Obama, Bill Richardson, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Chuck Hagel, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, John McCain, George Patacki, Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo and Tommy Thompson.

There is no halfway solution, you either vote for Ron Paul or you make the fiscal crisis worse!

Every new dollar spent by the government should be weighed against the future costs we face. That includes spending for education, health care, buildings (like the $130 million Federal Pork Court Building in Buffalo) and all other spending programs.

Source: Buffalo News: Home