05/11/2019
If that’s the case, why even bother having a military? Why pretend we have a country at all?
Leading 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden said this week that the U.S. must provide health care to everyone in the country, “regardless of whether they are documented or undocumented.”
Biden made the remarks while campaigning in Los Angeles, as he fielded questions from the media.
“Look, I think that anyone who is in a situation where they are in need of health care, regardless of whether they are documented or undocumented, we have an obligation to see that they are cared for,” Biden said in response to whether illegal immigrants “should be entitled to federal benefits like Medicare, Medicaid.”
[Biden backs health care for illegal immigrants, says 'we have an obligation' to provide it, by Lukas Mikelionis, Fox News, May 10, 2019]
Already, federal entitlement programs are heading for a crunch. It’s standard Conservatism Inc. rhetoric and I almost feel embarassed about saying it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. The federal government is simply not going to be able to meet its fiscal demands in the coming decades.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the federal government will begin running annual deficits exceeding $1 trillion in 2020 and run a cumulative 10-year deficit of $12.4 trillion from 2019 to 2028. These large deficits are on the order of those racked up immediately after the Great Recession, but they are now in the offing when the economy is strong, employment is high, inflation and interest rates are low, and the business cycle is likely near its peak. If we faced another recession today, we would be starting from a baseline of extremely high deficits and growing them further …
Historical data and CBO’s long-term projections tell the story. Over the 50-year period between 1968 and 2017, average annual federal tax collections equaled 17.4 percent of GDP. That hasn’t changed. CBO projects that if the 2017 tax cuts are extended, revenue would still be 17.4 percent of GDP in 2028 and 17.9 percent of GDP in 2038. Meanwhile, entitlement spending grew from 5.5 percent of GDP in 1968 to 10.4 percent in 2008. Today, it exceeds 13 percent. CBO projects that federal spending on just Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare subsidies will amount to an additional 4.6 percentage points of GDP in 2048, compared with today.
[Washington fiddles while the entitlement problem metastasizes, by Yuval Levin and James Capretta, Weekly Standard, September 24, 2018]
Of course, the Beltway Right simply wants to cut or restructure these programs. But that’s a shallow way of thinking about the problem. Doing anything about it politically is already impossible in a country with universal suffrage, when advocating cutbacks is a sure road to electoral ruin. If anything, entitlements are likely to grow in the years ahead as America’s burgeoning Third World population demands more entitlements and more racial preferences that will limit economic growth.
If these entitlements are promised to the entire world, it will encourage an even larger border rush than what we are experiencing now. It will also ensure that today’s middle-aged Americans will never see a dime from the social programs they are subsidizing today. But what does Joe Biden care? He got his; by the time the crunch hits, he'll be long gone.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.