According to the New York Times, by 2019, we will be paying $500 billion, or 347%, more to service the interest on our national debt than we will this year. Interestingly, that’s about the same time various private and government agencies have projected that Medicare will run out of money without a significant increase in funding and benefit reductions.
Now, lets pretend for a moment that the health care bill(s) before Congress cost only what they have been projected to cost over ten years. In all of the cases, the deficit reduction projected by the bills is less than $50 billion, and that only after taxing everyone for ten years to pay for five years of benefits. What’s the cost over the next ten years?
Meanwhile, according to most estimates, our GDP is expected to grow from $14000 billion to around $17000 billion by 2020. Meanwhile, our national debt will grow from $12000 billion to $20000 billion during the same period.
In other words, by 2020, we will have a national debt bigger than our annual GDP made up of, in great part, borrowing to pay for programs that will never pay for themselves and whose interest payments will represent 4 percent of the GDP. How do we pay for all of this?
I suspect we will pay by giving more and more of our work to the government in the form of ever-increasing taxes. How many of us can afford a 50 or 100 percent increase in what we pay in taxes right now over the next ten years?
Support what political philosophy you will, but facts don’t lie. We are about to spend and tax life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness out of existence unless we do something about it now.
DLH
