The readers of this blog know that my favorite topic is our very large national debt, now 77% of GDP (for the public part on which we pay interest) and predicted by the Congressional Budget Office to keep steadily getting worse, without major changes in current policy.
It is also well documented (see chart) that our entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the drivers of the huge annual budget deficits which make the accumulated debt so much worse and worse.
The economist John Cogan has an informative interview in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal explaining why entitlement spending is so difficult to control. First of all, according to Mr. Cogan, only three modern presidents have made any effort to control entitlement spending:
- FDR who persuaded Congress to repeal unjustified disability entitlements to 400,000 WWI, Philippine War and Boxer Rebellion veterans.
- Ronald Reagan “slowed the growth of entitlements like no other president ever had.”
- Bill Clinton’s welfare-reform plan not only reduced welfare’s burden on taxpayers but also benefitted the recipients, whom the old program had been harming.
Mr. Cogan identified three necessary political conditions for any entitlement reform. They are:
- Presidential leadership “without which there has never been a significant reduction in an entitlement.”
- Significant agreement among the general public and the elected representatives that there’s a problem.
- Bipartisan consensus on the solution for correcting the problem.
Conclusion. Think about it. This is a quite a gloomy assessment. Nothing will get done on the primary reason for our huge debt problem without both presidential leadership and bipartisan political support. When is this going to happen?
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