Lawmakers have long shied away from serious discussions about entitlement reform, but the issue appears to be coming back into focus for Republicans who are wary about the growing national debt.
"I definitely have noticed it," veteran GOP strategist Doug Heye told Fox News Digital of the uptick in GOP-led discussions on the issue. "Republicans have talked about this for a long time, not always with specifics. But what tends to happen is, they talk about it, they get attacked, they fall back."
Again, for those who aren't paying attention: Social Security is not the major issue. Yes, it is running a cash deficit, but last year's was small and a couple of years ago it actually ran a small fiscal surplus. It will continue being mildly in the hole for a few years but as the older Boomers die off that will cease. We could, for instance, bump the tax rate by 1% or raise the cap by a few tens of thousands, neither of which will destroy people's personal budgets, and it will be fine.
What won't cease is the Medicare and Medicaid problem. Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) is only 20% funded with tax receipts. Medicaid has no tax-based funding whatsoever; it is a pure giveaway. Medicare was funded with the presumption of about 3% of GDP being medical care with a 2.x% tax from the first dollar on earnings and in that regard it was reasonably well-based. However, due to rampant uncharged and unprosecuted felony misconduct, including price-fixing which is criminally illegal at a federal and many if not most-states level, it now consumes 20% -- or roughly five times as much of the economy while the tax rate has not gone up at all, say much less by a factor of five.
Medicare and Medicaid as they are today in a few years will not exist either because they're chopped up or because they blow up the budget and none of it exists. Those are the options unless the people demand, and enforce, that all those felonies be prosecuted right here, right now, and forevermore under penalty of doing whatever is necessary to cause them to be whether those actions to force prosecution are legal or not, forcing prices to contract by that aforementioned 80% (and the jobs "created" screwing people will, of course, evaporate.)
I get it that people would like for there to be some other answer but there isn't another answer. Fully one person in five in our economy makes their living screwing the entire nation literally into the fiscal ground. It would be nice if this was not true but it is true and no amount of yelling -- or sticking your head in the sand -- will change it.
There are a few people at least recognizing where the problem is:
"Interest rates are significantly higher and so too are debt service payments. At the same time, the Fed has had a hard time getting inflation fully under control," Winfree told Fox News Digital. "Those are market signals that the deficit really needs to come down. And the sooner policymakers begin to confront the biggest drivers of the deficit, specifically what is spent on federal health programs, the more likely it will be that they can protect programs for the most vulnerable."
If you need it you are not going to get it within the next few years so you better not need it.
I've said this since 2011 and in fact before then as I identified this as the "gateway issue" that was going to blow up the federal government all the way back to the 1990s when I was running MCSNet. I was laughed at repeatedly -- and I even put a date on it back then too -- 2025, more or less.
Who's laughing now?
Look folks, here are some basic facts when it comes to personal health:
- Get a Garmin with HRV or a similar device. Wear it. It will tell you with specificity what screws you and what does not.
- I will bet nearly any amount of money you wish to lose that for virtually everyone there is measurable and negative impact from consumption of fast carbohydrates (meaning sugars and other "white" carbs such as starches -- pastas, rice, etc.), grains, whether "whole" or not and especially seed oils, which are in damn near everything. Find a boxed cookie, granola bar or whatever and you will find seed oils on the label. They're in everything and damn near every restaurant other than perhaps very expensive sit-down places, use them exclusively to cook in and with. Proving that these "foods" have a material and individually-provable negative impact on your metabolically is trivial -- either on a glucose basis or on an HRV basis (or both for that matter.)
- If you are overweight or obese contemplate getting a CGM. Starting this summer you will be able to buy them over the counter without a prescription. They're not particularly cheap -- $100 or so a month -- so for many the Garmin route is cheaper and equally good as it will tag you for more than just carb-containing things -- but the CGM is much more-accurate when it comes to glucose and gives you instant feedback when you consume carbohydrate and how your body reacts to it.
If you are swallowing pills or using other drugs on a chronic basis (e.g. statins) you are very likely to be fucked folks. The simple fact is that the human body did not need these things and still doesn't unless you poison it.
If you don't want to know rather than determining what you can do to improve your personal health then shut the fuck up when you go bankrupt or worse, the government's funding for these programs collapses and they are forced to withdraw them. Get pissed at the politicians if you'd like but the fact remains that they should have prosecuted every one of the doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies over the last 30+ years and not only did they refuse you didn't force them to do it by giving them the alternative of either doing so or being personally punished by YOU for failing to do so. You therefore have given license to being screwed and, as I've repeatedly noted, the only difference between sex and rape is consent so until and unless you stop consenting and force these assholes, likely including some of your family and/or friends, to cut that shit out shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.
You think you can have asset bubbles, "foods" that are a nickel cheaper although they're full of metabolically damaging things which screw you the more you eat them and then when you have the bad things happen you're entitled to have someone else pay to pop a pill, have some other bad side effect occur and then go back and get another pill to treat the side effect you caused by taking the first one!
You're nuts, you've been nuts for the last three decades or more and the freebie "Gimme Dats" game has run out of coins in the slot.
When Covid hit I warned people that they had enough time to get rid of the excess weight and stop eating the shit after the first wave and before the second would inevitably come. Nobody did and lots of people got fucked because they didn't -- and that's a fact.
Well now a shit-ton of people are walking around screaming about "muhhhhhlongcovid" which is really long vax because you were dumb enough to fuck up your immune system and what's worse you stuffed your face with even more sugars and seed oils at the same time and thus you screwed yourself twice more.
Cut it out right fucking now or die horribly, in pain while I laugh at you because the "go to the doc and get a shot or a pill, paid for by someone else" crap is running out of rope and when the rope ends and you're 200' off the ground you are forced to deal with the fact that gravity is not a fantasy.