By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--February 3, 2015
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The great unmentionables in Mr. Obama's budget are entitlements, which roll on largely untouched. The share of the budget that is "mandatory"--not part of annual appropriations--is 15.1% of GDP in 2016 and jumps to 16.6% by 2020, gradually crowding out everything else the government is supposed to do. Medicaid spending will nearly double to $567 billion in 2025 from $301 billion in 2014. Most of that is ObamaCare. Meanwhile, the Social Security "off-budget surplus" that has long financed current spending on everything except retirement is shrinking and goes negative in 2017. This means senior benefits will soon have to be paid out of general tax revenues. These trends explain why deficits are lower for now but start to widen after 2018 despite Mr. Obama's tax increases and economic growth projections of 2.6% on average for the next five years. The Congressional Budget Office predicts 2.4% growth, which means even less revenue. Oh, and even with lower deficits, debt held by the public will be 75% of GDP this year, the highest level since 1950, and up from only 39.3% as recently as 2008.The political class is so detached from reality, it thinks it's doing something great when it merely slows - and not by all that much - the mounting of public debt. We're quickly approaching $18 trillion in debt we're steamrolling toward $25 trillion by the middle of the next decade, even assuming the rosy growth scenarios of the administration and the CBO. If the new GOP Congress isn't prepared to exercise leadership and explain to the public why we've got to put a restraint on all this, then the 2016 Republican presidential nominee had better. Obama and the Democrats certainly aren't going to. For them, a spending blowout is the only thing to have under any circumstance. If the public can't accept that absolute need to reverse this irresponsibility, it will deserve the national collapse is turning into a virtual guarantee.
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