

Loading Table of Contents...

Friday, March 07, 2008

Healthcare entitlements, stupid

At Justin Raimondo is quoted: "We simply can’t afford to police the world, and we’re going bankrupt in the attempt."

What is annual federal spending on Homeland Security and the so-called "War on Terror" (including Iraq)? $170 billion.

How much does that figure go up if one claims that fully half of the REST of the DoD budget is for "policing the world"? $240 billion.

What is annual federal spending on entitlements and "human services"? $1.6 trillion. (Apportioning federal debt service only tilts the needle more toward the welfare state and away from the warfare state, given the recent spike in world-policing costs.)

What is the unfunded liability for the current path of federal entitlement spending? $50 to $100 TRILLION dollars.

So who does Raimondo say is the remaining candidate who can save America from going "bankrupt"? Why, the one who advocates making our healthcare system even more socialized than it already is.

Healthcare entitlements will still be pushing America toward bankruptcy in 10, 20, and 30 years, but in that timeframe our spending on Bush's wars will be comparable to the current levels of spending on Clinton's Balkan war (remember it?) that Raimondo founded to oppose. Justin needs a t-shirt that says: "I surfed an antiwar movement that crested with the Sunni-Shia fighting of 2006, and all I got was socialized medicine."

American public finance over the next few decades will be about one issue: healthcare entitlements, stupid.

1 comment:

Mike Laursen said...

Hi, Brian. Are you including Social Security Trust funds in the $1.6 billion figure? Also, are you calculating in service of debt from past military spending into your numbers?

Also, I assume the $50-$100 trillion figure is total, not annualized. Is that right? If not, that's really, really scary.