The “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour” is a serious effort to get Americans to realize that the nation’s entitlement gravy train will run off a cliff a lot sooner than they think. Organized by the Concord Coalition, the tour is made up of a bipartisan mix of liberals and conservatives who don’t agree on much else, but who have put aside their differences to warn of the impending financial disaster. It is a disaster that cannot be avoided by the simple expedients of raising taxes or growing the economy.
How bad is it? Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told The Examiner recently that the present system of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits is “completely unsustainable.”
Riedl is no Chicken Little. The Congressional Budget Office’s December 2005 long-term budget outlook predicts that entitlement spending will absorb practically all federal revenues by 2030. “The model blows up around [the year] 2040, when entitlements will consume 70 percent of the nation’s GDP,” Riedl pointed out, forcing either massive tax hikes, a collapse of the safety net, a national economic death spiral — or perhaps all three. With $8.3 trillion in current debt, “we are living on borrowed money and borrowed time,” echoes Isabel Sawhill, vice president of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, one of several public policy groups also participating in the Wake-Up Tour.
Yet the political leadership needed to fix this looming economic nightmare is virtually nonexistent. For proof look no further than the House Appropriations subcommittee that just approved a measure prohibiting assessments of the effectiveness of federal programs. Our somnambulant Congress annually spends $152 billion on projects that have never worked as claimed by advocates.
Veteran local Congressman Frank Wolf, R-Va., is one of the few politicians willing to take on the entitlement problem head-on. Noting on the House floor that paying for future entitlements would consume 90 percent of every American’s net worth, Rep. Wolf introduced a bill June 8 to set up a 15-member commission similar to the 1988 Base Realignment and Closure Commission that has since done a superb job of making tough decisions on military base closings.
After spending 10 months examining all areas of federal revenue and spending, Securing America’s Future Economy Commission members would finally address the growing imbalance between long-term commitments and projected revenue. Like BRAC, Wolf’s bill limits Congress to an up-or-down vote, eliminating opportunities to water down SAFE recommendations for political reasons. Any fixes will admittedly be painful, but with 77 million baby boomers starting to retire in two years, time has simply run out.
Wolf — who has 11 grandchildren and one on the way — says he does not want to leave them a multitrillion dollar debt and certain financial ruin. “If we remember the legacy we have inherited,” he told his congressional colleagues, “we all will be moved to do our duty.” If they don’t, every future generation of Americans will live to regret it.
