The airways are congested with nonsense about cutting the deficit. Pundits and politicians alike are issuing dire warnings that the government may shut down because Democrats and Republicans can 't agree on what and how much to cut from discretionary spending.
What an enormous waste of time!
What difference will it make if the cut is $61 billion of $10 billion? The latter proposal from Democrats amounts to .28 percent of the federal budget. That's less than one third of one percent! The country is collapsing under the weight of 13 trillion dollars of debt, and we are arguing over whether or not to defund NPR? Gimme a break!
The solution to our debt problem is not to found in discretionary spending, although there is much to cut there. The real work will begin when our leaders address entitlements. The White House will not provide leadership here. That's clear. The president and his Senate sycophants will wait until Republicans offer a plan and then scream bloody murder in defense of the poor and the elderly. Pardon me for being cynical.
One word describes the only real approach to a solution. The word is ELIGIBILITY. Take Medicaid, for instance. Obamacare threatens to make thirty million more people eligible for Medicaid, when 28 percent of Americans are already getting it. That's an incredibly huge number. You only have to study the criteria for eligibility to understand why.
Medicaid was designed as a safety net for the poor who can't afford to buy health insurance. That's laudable. But the law mandates that not only individuals below the poverty line are eligible, but also those who are up to thirty percent above it. That is a prescription for insolvency if I ever saw one. And that is just one example of entitlement eligibilty gone wild. Social Security and Medicare have many more.
No one wants to remove the safety net for the poor. But until we restore sanity to our entitlement programs by re-examining eligibility for benefits, we will be left to argue about inconsequential government programs, while we sink below the surface of a tsunami of debt.
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