Posted on 09/12/2024 8:05:19 AM PDT by RicocheT
Ask any budget expert in Washington to explain the ballooning deficit and debt, and Social Security and Medicare will be high on the list of causes. That’s wrong. The real driver, the elephant in the room, is means-tested social-welfare spending—Medicaid, food stamps, refundable tax credits, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, federal housing subsidies and almost 100 other programs whose eligibility is limited to those below an income threshold.
True, Social Security and Medicare are a drain on general revenue and will become big fiscal problems if not reformed. But they aren’t the major source of our current fiscal crisis, because both are financed in large part by dedicated payroll taxes. Since its inception, Social Security has produced cash surpluses 60% of the time. In 2023 Social Security payroll taxes funded 88.9% of benefits. The cost of Social Security’s Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance program, net of payroll tax collections, was only $88.1 billion. Medicare payroll taxes and premiums funded 49.7% of Medicare expenditures, producing a net cost of $509 billion.
Means-tested social-welfare spending totaled $1.6 trillion in 2023. Welfare spending now absorbs an astonishing 72.6% of unobligated general revenue (total revenue net of Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes and premiums and mandatory interest on the public debt) and is larger than the claims against unobligated general revenue by Social Security (4.1%), Medicare (23.5%) and defense (37.2%) combined.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Obama disabled more people than WW2
It’s over. Tell me how it isn’t.
Absolutely! And California is the #1 receiver of these tax dollars.
Why don’t we start with the illegals -
Illegal invaders
Illegal wars
Illegal foreign “aid”
Illegal foreign entanglements
Then we’ll see about phase II.
I can’t see how it gets reformed. DC is too bloated, too woke, too addicted to debt.
The only reform will be economic and fiscal collapse.
A reminder that welfare is payment to not riot. So when the payments end............................
Welfare for the World Is What’s Eating the Budget
brandon is tapping into SS & Medicare to fund the migrants.
get ready for CUTS to US tax payers medicare benefits in order to pay for migrant care
Eventually we will run out, no more businesses that make anything, and the govt will fall. Good days. Like the fall of the USSR. Can’t stop progress.
I believe there is a solution, but not a solution that the current communist regime would allow. Welfare reform under my solution would require all able-bodied recipients under 62 to work for those benefits. This would especially include all “migrants” on welfare.
Under a regime like Trump’s... manufacturing could be brought back to the US and these welfare recipients could provide the labor needed... no unions allowed. Some might call the work I would recommend to be paid at “slave wages”... but in actuality, it’s more aligned with the commie ideal of “everyone contributes” what they can.
This reform could eventually push many out of the welfare system and “encourage” them to get real jobs paying better wages. This reform would also teach low/no-skilled workers a skill, of sorts. Assembly work is a skill. It would teach them to be responsible citizens that contribute vs. those that merely drain the system. It would give them a stake in the future of this nation, the one they have chosen to come to illegally.
For any of these welfare recipients that refused to work, they would be cut off and, if possible, returned to their country of origin.
I would also put prisoners to work in this same manner (instead of license plates, electronics assembly) paying back taxpayers for the free room and board (and education) that they were given previously. If they’re going to vote against the welfare of the nation by voting Democrat if or when they get out of prison, might as well make them work for the freebies while they’re in.
If this sounds harsh, maybe it is. But it would go a long way towards saving the nation from the impending economic collapse under radical leftists. That, along with no more US cash going to other nations, friendly or otherwise... America first.
None of these changes would ever be allowed by the Marxist left, however... since saving the nation is 100% against their current agenda.
Workfare, instead.
And as of today (9/12/24) the US has spent more than one TRILLION dollars on interest on the debt in this fiscal year.
Meanwhile, Congress tries to pass a continuing resolution to kick the can farther down the road.
Here's an idea: Tax the corporations for every employee they have that is on benefits. The government recoups the loss and hopefully the employees get a nice raise.
Unfortunately the entitlements identified in the article will be the end of the American experiment, all brought to you by greedy power mad politicians mainly of a leftist bent. Nothing will be done to cure the spending before it eats all of us.
It’s eating not only “the” budget, it’s eating your budget and mine. But...
Of course it is, this is how the DNC buys votes. Look at Britain for where this will take us in very short course.
For 50 years, 50 years, money has been taken from me to “even things out”.
50 years
Five decades
Half a century.
All we have done is make The Democrat Party Organized Crime Families rich.
You are completely giving the Republican crime families a pass they are ALL in on this BOTH PARTIES!!!
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