It never does stop, you know...

To all of the above, the moocher class -- this election year’s agitprop -- is the country’s biggest problem. It’s not. By claiming that it is, Republicans do a disservice to the party and to the national debate.

....

The U.S. in fiscal 2012 will spend about $210 billion on food stamps, unemployment insurance and welfare. Add in Medicaid and the tab swells to about $485 billion. Still, it’s small beer compared with the $1.3 trillion the U.S. will spend on Social Security and Medicare alone. Include $700 billion for defense, and the moocher class’s bounty looks even smaller.

Oh really?  I'll accept the numbers, as they're close enough for government work.

But Medicare and Medicaid are not "small beer."  And they are the moocher class tonic, not Social Security.

Why?  Because you paid less than 3% of your wages into Medicare, yet medical cost on a Federal expenditure basis (gross) has risen over 9% annually from 1980 to today, with no end in sight.  You paid in zero to Medicaid, incidentally, and its growth is in the double-digits in essentially every state, with some topping 20% this year.

To put this in perspective Medicare and Medicaid, together, are the majority of the deficit (~$820 billion last year.)  And they're growing at a rate that will eclipse the entire federal budget within 15 years.

Of course that won't happen; downward pressure will come one way or another.  Some of it will come by trying to force the states to pick up more and more of Medicare.  Some of the rest will come by "screwing" seniors.

But neither political party is talking about where the problem is really coming from, which is the medical industry that has managed to get passed myriad laws enabling monopoly and forced cost-shifting behavior, all of it on the back of the "bleeding heart" bull**** that comes out of mendacious goofs such as Bloomberg's editorial desk.

The simple fact of the matter is that the real issues facing this country are all pretty-much found in the medical and energy complexes.  Protection of the medical complex is where our deficit has come from more than anywhere else, with energy right behind it.  This in turn has led the government to permit and in fact promote serial bubbles and leverage expansion so that people can feel ok even as they are asset-stripped to support the continual expansion of these industries' reach into our pockets, and when we attempt to push back we're sold laws that then cement the hook in our wallet.

The response was more and more borrowing and more and more leverage, but now we've hit the wall on that.  This was, under any rigorous analysis, the root of the 2007/08 crisis and it hasn't gone away as nobody is addressing it.

Unfortunately the Republican party isn't addressing it either, and neither are the Libertarians.  The Tea Party won't touch it, and neither will the "organized left."

Bloomberg argues that we are given "shibboleths" from the right on the budget and deficit, but they offer nothing other than shibboleths on the left as well, ignoring the true cause of the problem.  There's no arguing with the arithmetic -- a line-item on a budget that goes from $53 billion to $820 billion over the space of 30 years is clearly where the problem lies.  Overlay that with the debt curves and it's obvious what government policy has promoted under both Democrat and Republican administrations, and further, that both parties are simply hurling mud to avoid having to take on the fact that they're both equally complicit.

Good luck to Bloomberg's View -- the outcome of these policies is quite clear -- it's bankruptcy and forced retraction of these programs.  Sure, today we can borrow for 10 years at 1.6%, but that presumes we intend to ever pay it back.  We never have before, which means that such "borrowing" is in fact nothing more than intentional dilution of the people's purchasing power, and that in turn means that the lower and middle classes will continue to get screwed blind by these "policies."

It's simple arithmetic folks -- specifically, division.

I suggest that The View's editors go back to elementary school.