1+1= Bankrupt (General)

Ok… disclaimers again. I am not a financial wizard or an economist so do your own homework and check my math. Did you know that the federal budget “entitlement” programs. (those which we have been committed to pay for every year to eternity) make up almost half of our federal budget? (State too) That means a shrinking percentage of our yearly budgets are actually under control of our lawmakers. These programs are considered “off limits” by our elected leaders for two reasons: #1 these programs were “promised to the people” and have been around so long they are now considered “rights” instead of privileges, and #2, anyone who suggests that we might need to look at updating and modernizing these programs is called vile names, accused of awful things, and run out of office faster than a speeding bullet. So, year after year, election after election, we watch the budget shrink, the entitlement programs grow, and nobody can talk about the oncoming train on the track. We are assured that the oncoming train is only an illusion and that it won’t hit us for at least another 10 minutes. In the next 20-30 years, the entire tax revenue for the entire USA will be required to pay for just 2 programs, Social Security and Medicaid. That means, no money for roads, no money for agriculture, no money for bailouts, and no money for defense of our country… zip, zero, nada. The entire federal budget will be required to pay for just 2 entitlement programs! It seems unlikely that anything will change soon because dealing with these “hard issues” will mean certain defeat in the next election…and us baby boomers are about to arrive at the buffet. Check the figures from the Office of Management and Budget. (OMB) and let me know where I might have gone wrong on the charts and graphs. I want to believe that it isn’t true but that expense arrow seems pretty clear to me. So, we have 30 years to plan for the train wreck, or decide that we really do need to engineer a more mature way to travel.