Sacred cows, look out: Cut Medicare, Social Security and defense


Or, like me, you got an extension. Boo!

In either case, it's a good week to think about what our tax money bought this year. And since we've all been promised federal tax reform this spring or summer from a unified legislative and executive branch, it's also good to reflect on how the federal government spends our tax dollars, and how it might spend them in the future.

A simple way to understand federal spending is to compare it to a household.

To keep it simple, let's say Uncle Sam has $100,000 to spend every year. Here's where all the money goes, based on the federal government's actual spending in 2015 and rounded to the nearest hundred dollars.

Roughly $33,400 is spent on Social Security, unemployment payments, food assistance, housing assistance, welfare and salary and benefits for federal employees. All of these are considered "mandatory" services in the sense that Americans are "entitled" to basic services. They are also known as entitlements. Congress doesn't get to vote on entitlement spending as part of its annual budget process.

We dished out $27,400 on Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health care costs each year. This is also considered mandatory spending that falls outside the annual budget process. The bill just comes in the mail and we pay it, no questions asked.

The federal government spends about $15,700 on our military every year. This is considered "discretionary" spending, or optional spending, and requires congressional approval every year.

Roughly $6,000 goes toward paying interest on the country's debt. That's basically like paying the interest on our credit cards without paying down any of the balance.

Everything else cost $12,000 in 2015, including veterans' benefits,transportation, education, energy, environmental projects and foreign aid.

So, if you were in Congress looking to rein in spending as the majority party, what would you cut?

Democrats don't want to give up Social Security or Medicare, while President Donald Trump and other Republicans want to boost military spending.

OK, sure, we all want security from foreign threats, security from catastrophic medical expenses and security from eating cat food in our old age.

But since entitlement reform (Social Security, Medicare, food, unemployment and housing subsidies) and defense spending become sacred cows, all budgetary discussion becomes really stoopid, really fast. Elected officials don't want to turn off half the electorate by promising to actually get serious about spending cuts, so they talk about stoopid stuff instead.

It's stoopid to focus on some bad art you don't agree with funding by the National Endowment for the Arts. It's stoopid to complain about pointy-headed liberals getting PBS funding. It's stoopid to focus on "waste, fraud and abuse" as a real source of cost savings in the federal government.

If you're not willing to discuss cutting both entitlement spending and defense spending, then I don't know what to tell you except you're not invited to my birthday party and your ideas about fiscal responsibility are stoopid too.

Having gotten that off my chest, let me say why each of the three biggest sacred cows - Social Security, Medicare and defense - should be targets for cost cutting at the federal level. I don't know the best way to do it. I'm just saying we could spend less on all three.

Social Security: When this was first enacted in 1935, the average lifespan in the U.S. was just under 62 years with the average Social Security recipient living until 74. (So once they made it to 65, they generally lived for another nine years, on average.) The average Social Security recipients today live until they're 82. That means the program is far more generous for far longer than originally intended. Sorry, folks, we need to raise the eligibility age; 80 might be a good place to start.

Medicare: We spend 30 percent more than Switzerland, the second-highest-spending country per capita and typically about double what rich countries like Canada, France and Japan spend on health care overall. We have notably worse outcomes in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality and other major chronic problems such as heart disease and diabetes. I don't pretend to know how to cut spending and improve the outcome. And anyway, who knew health care policy could be so complicated, right? But surely we could learn a thing or two from other countries about how to bring costs down while improving health outcomes.

Defense: We not only pay more for defense than any other country - and three times more than No. 2 spender China - we pay more than the next eight countries combined. Paying too much for one's military, to enforce global peace, is how empires always fall. Just ask the Romans, the Spanish and the English.


Everything else you say about federal government cost-cutting is a joke, and we're not stoopid.