Enslaved by debt

NY Times columnist David Brooks has written an article that appears to be an encapsulation of all my entitlement spending hand-wringing for the past eight years. The main point here is that if Americans dislike the discretionary spending cuts that are being considered in Congress, it is because auto-pilot entitlement spending is swallowing the U.S. budget:

The coming budget cuts have nothing to do with merit. They have to do with the inexorable logic of mathematics. Over the past decades, spending in nearly every section of the federal budget has exploded to unsustainable levels. Each year, your family’s share of the national debt increases by about $12,000. By 2015, according to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Moody’s will downgrade U.S. debt.

The greatest pressure comes from entitlements. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the debt has now risen to 47 percent of the budget. In nine years, entitlements are estimated to consume 64 percent of the budget, according to the invaluable folks at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. By 2030, they are projected consume 70 percent of the budget.

In other words, because nobody wants to cut Grandma's check, we have to make cuts elsewhere – "elsewhere" being shorthand for everything that Americans call "the government." But even with these "draconian" cuts, we're barely making a dent in the deficit:



In his CPAC speech, Mitch Daniels had it right (pun intended) when he called our national debt the new "red menace," a point David Brooks uses to conclude his article:

It’s not only about debt; it’s about freedom. It’s about whether we get to make budget choices or whether we have our lives dictated by the inexorable growth of programs beyond our control.

Exactly.