Hey, don’t sweat the numbers
It’s time for joyous song. Everybody, belt it out:
“Roll out the free stuff,
The ‘Crats have control of the House!
Roll out the free stuff,
For all there is plenty enough!” While rummaging through Trump’s tax returns, let us now savor the prospect of free college and free Medicare for all.
Let no cupboard be bare! There’s even talk in some quarters of free Social Security for all. That’s right, government stipends all around, no waiting till retirement. Share that Trust Fund pot ‘o’ gold. Why should just the geezer set be allowed to ride the gravy train?
There are, of course, the inevitable party-poopers.
Republicans as usual will continue to preach their earnest sermons on frugality, while declining to offer any support for the virtue beyond words, fearing, understandably, that otherwise they’ll be condemned as hard-hearted bean-counters.
Skeptics will be asking how can we afford more free stuff when state pension systems, Social Security and Medicare are all on bankruptcy trajectories, and when the national debt is, in scientific notation, 21.6 multiplied by 10 to the 12th power ($21,691,245,489,000 and counting)?
How can we afford more free stuff? Easy. Simply make the rich pay their “fair share” of taxes. Yes, according to the IRS, the richest 1 percent already pay nearly 40 percent of all income taxes collected, while the bottom 50 percent ante up just 2.75 percent of the total.
But if the rich have the loot to pay that big a share, they surely have more wealth stashed away, additional wealth enabling them to pay more. Endless sums more! Grab ‘em by the ankles and shake it out of these greedy kulaks!
And so, as the drunks on the streets say at Mardi Gras time, “Laissez les bon temps rouler!” Or as Mad Magazine’s icon, Alfred E. Neuman, says: “What - me worry?”
Hey, it’s all just numbers, anyway.
If Medicare had enough money that Sen. Bob Menendez’ buddy could steal $90 million from it without the sum being missed for years, then surely Medicare has the means to spread its munificence far and wide.
Medicare spending now tops $700 billion a year and will top $1 trillion in five years — and countless trillions more if made available to all. But again, what’s a billion? What’s a trillion? Just numbers.
George Mason University’s Mercatus Center says Medicare for all (not just old folks) would cost $32.6 trillion in the first 10 years — a sum that not even a doubling of income and corporate taxes could cover.
But Democrat proponents insist — despite the example of the $90 million Bob Menendez’ buddy stole from Medicare — that with government in total charge of medical care, costs will plummet.
Anyway, whether it’s $32.6 trillion or $32.6 gazillion, it’s — again — just numbers. Incomprehensible numbers.
The websites say that with a salary of $40,000 a year, it would take you 25 million years to make a trillion. Numerical gibberish. The mind-numbing math anesthetizes us against reality. If we can’t comprehend the magnitude of something, then there’s no way we can fret about it.
It would take you 95 years, without a break, 24/7, to count to 1 billion, we are told. If you spent at a non-stop rate of $1,000 a second, you still wouldn’t get to $1 trillion in 30 years.
Stop! Eyeballs glaze over and roll back in the head. The Medicare and Social Security trustees tell us that the “trust funds” for these programs — i.e., borrowed money in the form of special government securities, something like loans to pay down credit-card balances — are approaching their end days: Medicare’s by 2026, Social Security’s by 2034. Per capita “entitlement” spending has increased “nearly twice as fast as per capita income over the last five decades,” reports George Mason University economist Veronique De Rugy. The Census Bureau reports that 51.7 percent of households in 2017 received food stamps, medical assistance, housing assistance, school lunches, cash welfare stipends and/or various other “means-tested” benefits — a statistic inflated, incidentally, by immigration, including the illegal variety.
After 2034, Social Security payroll taxes will be sufficient to cover only 75 percent of benefits, the Social Security trustees say.
Meanwhile, the national debt soars ever upward, toward. . .well, toward infinity. The annual interest payments snarf up bigger and bigger slices of the annual federal budget. That annual sum was $263 billion last year, with interest rates at a rock-bottom low. Those annual payments will reach $800 billion in 2027. That’s more than the sum now spent on Medicare. More than now spent on the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines combined.
But all of these numbers are loose change compared to the red-ink numbers of the state’s taxpayer-subsidized public employee pension systems, hell-bent on bankruptcy.
And it’s not just those stingy old naysaying Republicans who say so. By the reckonings of the Pew Research Foundation, these pension systems have pledged $1.4 trillion more in long-term benefits than they have the financial means to cover.
This flood tide of red ink has risen $259 billion just since 2015. (New Jersey’s pension systems are among the most irresponsibly financed, with the means to cover, in the long term, only 31 cents on every dollar of promised pension payments, by Pew’s calculations.)
And given the Leviathan-like dimensions of the nation’s public payrolls — there are nearly 22 million employees, federal, state and local, 9.6 million more than hold jobs in manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the pension plans’ unfunded future liabilities look all the more like a tsunami. (New Jersey has 100 public employees per 10,000 people. Pennsylvania somehow manages to get by with 77 per 10,000, Ohio with 55.)
The Pew Research Foundation numbers crunchers put it this way: America’s recklessly over-extended public pension plans have $2.6 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in unfunded liabilities. A household or business with a proportional financial imbalance like that would find itself deep in the doo-doo of Chapter 7 liquidation proceedings.
But, hey, remember: These are just numbers. A billion here, a trillion there. A quadrillion, a quintillion, a sextillion...Who can grasp it? And if we can’t grasp it, why sweat it?
All together now, belt it out: “Roll out the free stuff,
The ‘Crats have control of the House!
Roll out the free stuff,
For all there is plenty enough!”