Entitlement Spending outpacing defense spending.

[Claydon]

Unless dramatically reformed, entitlement programs will soon choke out funding for even the most basic and fundamental nation defense capabilities, according a recent report from The Heritage Foundation.
The year 1973 saw mandatory government spending (Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare) outpace defense spending for the first time. Uninterrupted ever since, there is little doubt that ballooning entitlement spending will continue to soak up greater and greater amounts of the federal budget. Recent CBO findings report, "almost all of the projected growth in federal spending other than interest payments on the debt comes from growth in spending on the three largest entitlement programs--Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security." Indeed, with Social Security growing 147%, Medicaid growing 166%, and Medicare ballooning to a whopping 331% from 2005 to 2030, the federal government's entitlement spending will leave US GDP (expected to grow 72% during that same time) in the financial dust. This holds devastating consequences for US national defense capability as needed funds are cut from the military and directed instead to feed swollen entitlement programs.

In fact, the mighty US military is already on the chopping block, as seen in the FY 2010 defense budget. According to the CBO, the bill's "overseas contingency operations" funding represents a decrease of 10 percent from the amount appropriated for 2009 for the same operations. "The decreases are primarily in accounts for military personnel and procurement," or equipment and basic military hardware. As Heritage's Baker Spring writes, the Administration's defense budget "provides insufficient resources for the core defense program" and that as a result, "the core defense budget will fall to less than 3.3 percent of GDP in 2014," not enough to keep up with rising military costs.
According to the CRS, "an average military service member is about 45% more expensive, after adjusting for inflation, in FY2009 than in FY1998." Spring and others at Heritage have long maintained that a floor of 4 percent of GDP is required for defense spending to stay effective in the face of rising costs. If this seems too high, consider that this proposed benchmark is "only 40 percent of total spending on the three major entitle¬ment programs."
America's military may be facing defeat at the hands of its own government if entitlement programs are not dramatically reformed in the immediate future.

http://sitrep.globalsecurity.org/articles/090702404-how-out-of-control-entitlement.htm

[Stax]

Looks like the wrong story quoted...

[Claydon]

Looks like the wrong story quoted...

DAMN!

[BIG PIZZLE]

Somebody's gotta pay for all those disfigured soldiers.

[freegood]

This op/ed sems related to this thread.

Suddenly, a Trillion Is Too Much?
By Joe Conason (http://www.politickerny.com/4297/suddenly-trillion-too-much)

If Americans hope to discuss health care, climate change, green economics or public infrastructure with any degree of realism, then the time has come to acknowledge that hearing someone say “a trillion dollars” is no reason to panic. Politicians and pundits cite that figure to argue that we cannot afford health care reform, following recent cost estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, but the plain truth is that we spend (and squander) more than that on purposes not nearly so wise and humane as universal quality health care.

As a matter of fact, America’s current health care system wastes considerably more than a trillion dollars every year. We know that because countries such as France, Germany, Japan, and Finland, with comparable standards of living to ours, spend roughly half what the United States spends annually on health care per citizen, while covering everyone and achieving better results. So if the total cost of American health care over the coming decade reaches $40 trillion, as economists expect, then we will be “wasting” approximately $20 trillion, or $2 trillion a year.

Compared with figures such as those, the CBO scoring estimate of $1.6 trillion over 10 years to reform the U.S. health care system is so small as to be almost negligible. Constantly hearing numbers that sound so large makes perspective even more important. When Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt actually did the simple calculations, he found that the price of reform amounted to only 4 percent of the country’s cumulative health care budget between next year and 2020. He noted that this amount is much less than the annual increase in health care spending over the past 10 years. And he also pointed out that on the broader economic horizon, that $1.6 trillion represents only about 1 percent of the $170 trillion in gross domestic product that Americans will produce over the same period.

Investing a trillion dollars or so in modernizing and improving our health care system is a good bargain—especially when contrasted with the maddening way that we have thrown away tax dollars over the past several years. Undoubtedly the worst example of wasteful spending in recent memory is the war in Iraq, that imperial misadventure so beloved by the same conservative thinkers who incessantly bemoan the supposedly unaffordable price of health reform.

Touted early on by its eager promoters as free, cheap, or self-financing, the war’s ultimate cost is currently expected to run as high as three trillion dollars, according to Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist who wrote a book on the subject last year with his colleague Linda Bilmes. Even as the Obama administration is pulling U.S. troops out of Iraqi cities in preparation for eventual withdrawal, the Iraq war will remain a financial black hole in the federal budget for many years to come as we continue to support the injured veterans and to rebuild the damaged American military.

Yes, a trillion dollars is a significant amount of money, even on a scale as large as the American economy. Had we avoided the stupid waste of two or three trillion on the war, we could have paid for a long list of social goods that would have improved the lives of the American people, enhanced their productivity and secured their future. To name only a few of many better choices, we could have moved rapidly toward alternative energy sources and reduced our dependence on foreign sources of oil for about $500 billion, achieved universal literacy in the United States for about $5 billion, rebuilt the Gulf Coast damaged by Hurricane Katrina for about $200 billion, ended hunger and all the diseases caused by poverty for another $200 billion—and still have a substantial sum remaining to build new schools, roads, bridges, railways and other badly needed infrastructure.

The senators who now claim that we cannot afford to spend a trillion dollars to make long overdue changes in health care know exactly what that amount can buy. They know because they have spent it, year after year, on military misadventures and subsidies to big banks and corporations, without stinting or whining. Somebody should ask why they think we can afford those trillion-dollar boondoggles but not decent health care for all Americans.

[Debo]

This isn't news or new information. Everyone knows that SS, Mcare and Mcaid are going to eat us alive. The only question is: How can we fix them?

P.S. Defense spending is down from its high of around 14.2% of GDP during the Korean War to around 5% of GDP now.

http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges/medicare-and-medicaid/

Another:
http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges/medicare-and-medicaid/page/5/

More:
http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges-charts/page/17/

http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges/medicare-and-medicaid/

[Claydon]

This isn't news or new information. Everyone knows that SS, Mcare and Mcaid are going to eat us alive. The only question is: How can we fix them?

P.S. Defense spending is down from its high of around 50% of GDP during the Korean War to around 5% of GDP now.

http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges/medicare-and-medicaid/

Another:
http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges/medicare-and-medicaid/page/5/

http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges/medicare-and-medicaid/

yup, during mcnamara in the 60s defense spending was at or above 50% of GDP.

[Debo]

yup, during mcnamara in the 60s defense spending was at or above 50% of GDP.

I edited that. I think that it was 50% of the budget.

According to the historical tables released in connection with the administration’s 2009 budget proposals (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/pdf/hist.pdf), defense spending reached a high of 37.8 percent of GDP during World War II. During the final year of the Korean War, defense spending as a percentage of GDP topped out at 14.2 percent. It seems unlikely that we will ever see defense spending at those levels again.http://www.volokh.com/posts/1212523477.shtml

Table 3.1 of this report has all of the data:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/pdf/hist.pdf

I was talking about as a percentage of outlays, not GDP. I fixed it, but you quoted me so my error is now preserved in history. Damn you.

[Claydon]

I was talking about as a percentage of outlays, not GDP. I fixed it, but you quoted me so my error is now preserved in history. Damn you.

just spreading the love

[HAWK]

"almost all of the projected growth in federal spending other than interest payments on the debt comes from growth in spending on the three largest entitlement programs--Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security."

Let's just delete these programs and get rid of all the old/disabled people and build from there. Kinda like an historical reset button.

[Swurgen]

Nah...let's nationalize a bunch of illegals who drop anchor babies so that when they get old, we can try to support even more people who never paid into the program.