The most clear-eyed view of the silliness of the deficit commission report comes from Kevin Drum, who points out that at heart it says much less about reducing the size of the deficit than it does about reducing the size of the government. The distinction is a crucial one, since the mathematics of the deficit are simple, and overwhelmingly a function of Medicare expenditures. “Medicare, and healthcare in general, is a huge problem,” says Drum: “It is, in fact, our only real long-term spending problem.”
Medicare is a true fiscal nightmare. The population of the US is aging: the current Medicare enrollment of 47 million will soar to 71 million by 2025. Those people will be living longer, too, and their healthcare costs are certain to continue to rise not only faster than inflation, but also faster than the growth of the economy as a whole. So long as the U.S. commits to pay the healthcare costs of substantially everybody over the age of 65, nothing else really matters, in terms of the long-term fiscal deficit.
Here’s Drum:
Any serious long-term deficit plan will spend about 1% of its time on the discretionary budget, 1% on Social Security, and 98% on healthcare. Any proposal that doesn’t maintain approximately that ratio shouldn’t be considered serious. The Simpson-Bowles plan, conversely, goes into loving detail about cuts to the discretionary budget and Social Security but turns suddenly vague and cramped when it gets to Medicare. That’s not serious.
And here’s Matt Steinglass, commenting on Drum:
Mr Drum writes for a liberal magazine. And here he is saying that the main thing we need to do in order to restrain growth in the deficit and in government spending, which will otherwise bankrupt us, is to cut the biggest government entitlement programme, Medicare. Indeed, this is a bog-standard consensus position among American liberals… Shouldn’t this be shocking? Shouldn’t this be big news for our contrarian press? “Liberals Call for Cuts to Entitlements!” Aren’t we amazed that supposedly big-government liberals want to slash the projected Medicare budget?
The point here is that the deficit commission chairmen are doing everything in their power to perpetuate the intellectually dishonest meme that if we just pare enough excess from the government’s discretionary budget, that can somehow solve the problem of the soaring deficit. It can’t. Liberals like Drum recognize the problem, and can work out the mathematics of Medicare in public. The deficit commission, it seems, can’t.
Felix Salmon is a financial writer, editor, and podcaster. A former finance blogger for Reuters and Condé Nast Portfolio, his work can be found at publications including Slate and Wired, as well as his own Substack newsletter.