Let’s forget, for a second that Social Security isn’t an entitlement and try to think the inaccurate way that many politicians talk.
Social Security is currently running a $2 trillion surplus. That’s massive and it comes from the Baby Boomer generation’s large number of employed workers paying into it. That surplus might be five times that number if the system hadn’t been looted by every politician who couldn’t figure out how to pay for his favorite program and borrowed (read stole) from it to do so. It still would have maintained its position if those funds had been paid back. This is called a felony. Read the SS Law.
Negative estimates say that the $2 trillion will be gone by 2030 if we don’t do something about it. How about the government pays back what they owe to the taxpayers who invested their own money into it.
Medicare’s costs, which have been estimated to eat up a large part of the Federal Budget over the next 75 tears have actually come down as a result of a drop in health care costs brought on by just the threat of Obamacare. The projected costs would be even lower if not for the huge profit taking that currently exists in the medical industry. This is especially true in drugs, hospital costs, private insurance and physical technology, all of which whould be substantially reduced in a fair marketplace. Obamacare addresses many of these costs and if it can be transitioned to single payer it will substantially cut the cost of insurance.
Recognizing that there is no emergency situation surrounding either of these programs, we still must admit that much can be done to insure their existence far into the future.
If we can’t get the government to pay back what it owes to Social Security, the best way to compensate for that is to extend the cap in the payroll tax so that those that are in the top 1% of earners have to pay it past the current cut-off amount. An increase in payroll contributions for all is also a possibility but even better would be the imposition of a transition tax on all stock sales. It has been estimated that even a tiny per transition tax, as low as 3 cents, would add hundreds of billions to the Social Security pool.
Now I know that there are many Americans who bristle when confronted by examples of what others in the world do, more successfully, than us. They take it a as personal affront if anyone is doing anything better then us when we should be learning from them. They adopt a childish air of offense and bounce off in a huff. Well, get over it. Almost every country in Europe handles health care better than we do and they do it by controlling fly-away costs.
Ever wonder why every mother in the country wants her son to be a doctor? It isn’t because she loves imagining him wrist deep in bloody intestines. It actually has something to do with yachts and country clubs. Triple this and you get some idea of what goes on in the medical technology industry and quintuple it to view the profits in drugs. It’s nice to see American companies prosper but not at the cost of kids going without health care.
So what’s the answer? Well, there are a multitude of possibilities out there, some of which have the president and some middle road Democrats, trying to weasel out a grand bargain in which hey give up substantial sections of Social Security and Medicare to their far right opposition. I see this kind of solution as costing all of the above their jobs. The polls are pretty rock solid on these issues with as much as 82% of Democrats and 74% of Republicans not wanting either program touched.
So the obvious answer is that the money to balance the budget has to come from some place else. That place has to be the other huge piece of our budget, the military and defense. You can talk all you want about medical technology spending but when the discussion turns to military technology you really get into the big time of cost overruns. The waste in our defense and military budgets is staggering and the lobbies that defend it are even more staggering.
The state of Vermont is currently fighting to construct a base for the F35 fighter. It will displace thousands of Vermonters, cost the government a couple of billion and for what? For a plane that after twelve years and billions in development is still unable to perform and by the time it is, will be obsolete. Why is this disgraceful waste continuing? Two reasons. Defense contractors have the biggest lobby in Washington and defense technology has actually become a jobs program.
We have thousands of functional tanks in storage all over the country. They are not being used because there is no longer much use for tanks in 21st Century warfare. But we are still manufacturing them. Why? They go directly from factory to storage, rotting away in some desert out west. We’re talking about billions of dollars here, money that could save the healthcare and entitlement systems all by itself but still we keep pouring dollars down the military/industrial toilet because some lobbyist keeps yelling that we must keep America safe for Democracy. You want to keep America safe for Democracy, shut down NSA.
The world has changed since WWII but apparently this has escaped our CIA, NSA, military intelligence services and the Pentagon. We don’t successfully fight our enemies with great armies, we don’ overrun cities with battalions of tanks. We don’t need to bomb our adversaries into oblivion and when we try we leave an unalterable mess that haunts us for yeas.
So why do we have a million men stationed in 700 bases all over the world? Why do we have seven carrier squadrons patrolling the oceans at a cost of billions? Our military commitment is greater than the next 13 nations in the world, combined. There is no power that even approaches our status and still we add more. It is all a colossal waste. We have already replaced tanks and aircraft with new technology and still we keep manufacturing them at enormous cost while children go to faulted schools, poor people die for lack of medical care and our infrastructure rots away.
If our military budget were half of what it is, we would still be the biggest, strongest, most powerful military force on the planet by a country mile.
The solution to most of our financial problems lies in our bloated military spending. The guys who are building tanks should be building robots for a generation that will no longer do manual labor, the ones creating technology for planes should be teaching our kids how to do what they do, with electronics and computers and the soldiers lounging around in bases in Italy, Germany and the other couple of hundred places where there is no need for them, should be here building new infrastructure.
We are still the richest country in the world. If we learn to stop paying for useless crap and concentrate on spending our money on things that make life better for those who live here, we will be a hell of a lot better off then if we continue to obey the lobbyists for greedy companies and billionaires who think only of the size of their profits and ignore the scope of the good they can do.