Some real numbers

Just to cut through all the Washington hype and political sound bites, consider the following facts:

The federal deficit under President Obama’s proposed budgets will approach $20 trillion in 2020. At that size, the annual interest payment alone will be more than we spend on all discretionary domestic programs put together.

As currently constituted, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will by 2020 account for about half of all government spending.

Democrats like the idea of taxing the rich to solve the deficit problem. Unfortunately, those who are in the top 5% income bracket already pay over 50% of all federal taxes, so soaking the rich some more doesn’t work – there aren’t enough of them. If we took all of their income it wouldn’t be enough. That means that to balance the projected federal budget by 2020 (just balance it – not even begin to pay off the debt), taxes on all of us would need to go up by about 30%.

Republicans like the idea of cutting government spending to solve the deficit problem. The 2020 deficit is projected to be about $1.3 trillion. That could be eliminated if all discretionary non-security domestic programs, including aid to education, the National Institutes of Health, and air-traffic controllers, were eliminated. Or we could cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid outlays in half. That would just balance the budget, it wouldn’t do anything to pay back what we already owe.

Clearly we have a massive problem, much more than can be solved with a few token budget cuts around the edges and a lot of cute sound bites from politicians.