Milton Ezrati has a post up over at City Journal that opens with these two paragraphs:
For all the promises made by politicians on both sides of the aisle, budget math makes clear how little room exists for new government spending. The federal budget is on autopilot. Spending for entitlements will soon crowd out most of what Washington does. Any new initiative that requires major financing is suspect.
The underlying budget realities are stark. Some 70 percent of all federal spending goes to entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and the still relatively small (for now) costs of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These spending flows continue to grow automatically; Congress doesn’t even debate them. Legislative discretion does come into play regarding the next-largest budget item—defense, at about 17 percent of the total—but even here, little room for maneuver exists, given past cuts and today’s deteriorating geopolitical situation. Interest obligations on outstanding federal debt eat up another 6.5 percent of the total. That leaves barely 6.5 percent of the budget for everything else Washington does— including education, infrastructure spending, and all the other things that the political class discusses and about which it makes its most lavish promises.
It’s not complicated. It shouldn’t be difficult to communicate this reality to grown-up Americans who are able to do basic math. The Republican presidential candidates — all of them — had better start getting serious about taking the nation to school.
Read Milton Ezrati’s entire article here.
Image credit: Patrick Scheider/KRT Newscom.
