Quote of the Week

This week's Quote comes courtesy of Karl Denninger, who has inspired more than a couple of my rants here in the past. It stems from the Congressional Budget Office's projections released yesterday, which are absolutely chock full of ugly numbers and statistics (ignore them at your own peril). Let's get right to it:

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Government spending for Medicare, Medicaid and other healthcare programs will more than double over the next decade to $1.8 trillion, or 7.3 percent of the country's total economic output, congressional researchers said on Tuesday.


In its annual budget and economic outlook, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said that even under its most conservative projections, healthcare spending would rise by 8 percent a year from 2012 to 2022, mainly as a result of an aging U.S. population and rising treatment costs. It will continue to be a key driver of the U.S. budget deficit."
                                           - David Morgan, Reuters

Look at that first paragraph: that's 7.3 percent OF THE COUNTRY'S TOTAL ECONOMIC OUTPUT! Not of tax revenues, not of total government spending, of the ENTIRE ECONOMIC OUTPUT. In case you were wondering, total federal tax receipts in 2011 were approximately $2.3 trillion, on total economic output (GDP) of $14.6 trillion--about 15.8% of total economic output. That means that our expected expenditure on health care programs would be a full HALF of everything that we currently bring in from tax revenues.

That is, in a word, untenable. There's absolutely no way to make these programs solvent, and we need to stop pretending that there is. We can't grow our way out of this problem, we can't inflate our way out of this problem (hi, Ben), and we certainly can't default our way out of it (although that's where we're heading).

Oh yeah, and just repealing Obamacare doesn't do anything to help matters either, in case any of you Republican-lovers were wondering.

This country is bumping up against fundamental problems with respect to how it cares for its elderly, and it's clear that we've made promises that we mathematically cannot keep. A millionaire tax or a wealth tax or an inflation tax or whatever other tax can't compensate for the fact that there's just simply not enough money to go around. We need to admit that we've made promises that we can't keep, and begin the ugly and unpleasant process of reneging on those promises. The longer we wait, the worse the problem will get--procrastination is an expensive vice that we simply cannot afford.

[Reuters]
(h/t Karl Denninger)