Posted on 07/25/2011 8:11:00 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It's been assumed -- but never confirmed -- that if we hit the debt ceiling, that The Treasury could prioritize payments, continuing to make bond coupon payments and entitlements, while shutting off other spending.
The Bipartisan Policy Center has put together a presentation (.pdf) on the debt ceiling, and what prioritization would look like (via Stone Street Advisors).
These two charts show it all.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Look how health and human services grants are hidden in the middle.
These “grants” are payments to the states so the states can use their money for other stuff and represents creeping federalism at its most malignant
Y U P
SS receipts are even or close to their expenditures last I heard though I imagine things have gotten worse (and Obama reduced receipts recently- Dems can’t help raiding SS).
Didn’t know medicare was funded that way, I wonder why?
Anyway it still comes out surprisingly close IMHO!
And just where is he supposed to work digger
Where did you come up with that figure? They were only $2.2 trillion in 2010. And our expenditures were $3.5 trillion.
read later
“Other Spending $52b”. It’s the biggest item in either list and nothing in it is important enough to be broken out. In my company I think we’d cut that and say come back to us on individual items you feel like you can justify.
These aren’t “all or nothing”. For example Dept. of Ed is one of the bigger items. You’ll get a lot of push back saying we can’t cut Pell Grants. But those are probably $5-7b (I think 40% of the budget). There’s another $12b+ allowing the DoE to screw local schools with NCLB. We can certainly cut that budget by 50% without many downsides.
Yes, it has become welfare. I knew several people last year who I found jobs for. They were all but hired. The jobs were just convenience store $8 an hour. They were all too lazy to put down their draft beer and go fill out the forms.
Who’s the genius who thinks it’s more important to pay unemployment benefits than active duty military????
Not even close. SS ran a $29 billion shortfall in 2010 or about $2.5 billion (enough to pay active duty military salaries) and an anticipated $34 billion in 2011 or about $3 billion a month.
Didnt know medicare was funded that way, I wonder why?
Because if people had to pay payroll taxes and premiums to cover the costs, the increase in taxes and premiums would be enormous. And the monthly diffence between what premiums pay and what must come out of the general fund amounts to about $19 billion a month. And that number will continue to climb as 10,000 baby boomers a day retire from now until 2030. If not reformed, Medicare will consume one out every two federal non-entitlement dollars by 2085.
So the shortfall for SS and Medicare amounts to about $22 billion a month and it will increase every year.
Why is that?
A horribly expensive part of Medicare is payment for ESRD. Dialysis costs about $1200 every time you walk into the clinic (more or less - my bill for March was $9600 but I was on the machine only twice weekly to save money). I finally got Medicare straightened out (I had to!! My private insurance insisted that BY LAW, after 30 months of [expensive] medical payments, they had to become secondary to Medicare and that they would only pay 20% of the cost of my care from now on). My Medicare “premium” is all of $120 a month, while my COBRA payments are $629 per month.
ESRD cost Medicare $28 billion last year for about 500K people including an unknown number of illegal aliens.
I was just getting started.
:)
Constrained by other duties.
But y’all get the drift that there’s PLENTY of lard to be trimmed before we start hitting the military and retirees.
Good grief.
IIRC, I read somewhere that cuts of 25-40% just gets us back to 2005 spending levels.
Medicare recipients receive three times the amount in benefits that they paid into the system thru taxes and benefits. The system is unsustainable.
Go to default!!!!
You identifed the bs factor in this whole sham.
Give Pakis 7.5 Billion, not to mention all the other foreign governments plus the billions we dump into the UN then threaten not to pay the Americans’ armed forces.
Traitors.
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