Feel Better Now?

With all the news about budgets and the economy, allow me try to make sense of everything. Our federal government takes in about $2 trillion annually. President Obama’s budgets have been over $3.7 trillion.

For comparison, in today’s dollars, President Bush’s budgets were about $2.4 trillion and President Clinton’s averaged $2.1 trillion. Democrats talk about cutting the budget $0.04 trillion, while Republicans have proposed the stupendous figure of $0.10 trillion! They’re both clueless – the math is very easy (I learned this at Marble Elementary): we’re $1.7 trillion in the red – annually.

With limited ability to continue borrowing $1.7 trillion every year, the solution is simple – we must cut the federal budget by almost 50%. Anything less than half won’t eliminate the deficit and pay back our $14.2 trillion debt. Think about what this means – half of all federal employees (military, too) go away. Half of welfare, half of food stamps, half of Medicaid, half the federal parks, half of TVA, half of low income housing – all gone. And, this doesn’t address underfunding of Social Security.

When the system was created, retirement for men was 75 and the average lifespan for a man was 60 – this meant that the average man died 15 years BEFORE receiving benefits (government officials designed it this way). Retirement for women was 65 and the lifespan was about 62, so most of them died, too, before they received benefits. In other words, for the system to be mathematically viable, the retirement age must be, on average, 8 years GREATER than the lifespan. So, to make the system possible, the retirement age must be raised to about 87. It doesn’t matter whether or not this number is popular or that you wish it were something else – it’s the only thing that restores the original design. Feel better now?

Jerry Kilpatrick