Thousands of Idahoans rely on money from the federal government for health, retirement or just to stay out of poverty.
That dependence is even higher nationwide and it illustrates the incredible challenges of seemingly simple goals, such as “just cut spending” or “reform entitlements.”
Federal benefit payments account for 30 percent or more of all personal income in four of Idaho’s 44 counties. Relatively affluent Ada County relies on federal checks for 14 percent of all income. In Canyon County, the percentage is nearly twice that.
Advocacy groups warn that cuts to Medicare or any other part of the nation’s social safety net, even reductions in projected increases, would be devastating.
As President Barack Obama and Congress debate ways to avert a pending fiscal crisis, the country broadly agrees that they need to cut federal budget deficits. There’s solid support for raising taxes on the wealthy, but those tax increases alone wouldn’t come close to solving the problem. And cutting spending is extremely difficult.
Look in the mirror for the key to the problem: An ever-increasing number of Americans get a piece of federal spending.
Nearly 150 million Americans — that’s about 49 percent — receive some government payment. That includes Social Security, veterans’ benefits, Medicare or Medicaid, and food stamps, according to Census Bureau figures from last year, the most recent available.
Among them:
• 80 million get help from Medicaid, the health insurance for the poor.
• 49 million get Social Security.
• 48 million get food stamps.
• 45 million get Medicare.
Beyond that, there are price supports for farmers. Money for schools. Road, bridge and highway construction programs that employ thousands. Popular public broadcasting shows.
“It’s really quite simple: People who get the spending like to keep getting it,” veteran Washington budget analyst Stan Collender said. “Almost any spending that’s still in the budget has substantial political support.”
Numerous polls show widespread enthusiasm for cutting spending in general, but there’s resistance to specific trims, Collender said.
“With the possible exception of foreign aid, and every once awhile NASA, almost nothing has a majority of support for cutting,” Collender said. “If you read the public opinion polls, Americans don’t want their government to do less, they just want it cost less.”
Indeed, a recent McClatchy-Marist Poll found overwhelming opposition to every option mentioned to cut spending. Fully 85 percent of voters oppose any reductions in Medicare, for example; 59 percent oppose raising the eligibility age for Medicare. And the opposition cuts across party lines.
The personal stake in the federal budget has grown by leaps and bounds since the creation of Medicare in the 1960s and the expansion of it to cover prescription drugs in the past decade.
Federal spending sent to individuals for entitlements such as food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security has more than doubled as a share of the federal budget, from 25 percent in 1960 to more than 60 percent today.
Erskine Bowles, a former Clinton White House chief of staff who co-chaired a bipartisan budget commission, said the broad vested interest made it difficult to cut spending.
“Everybody is like my Mama,” who wants the problem fixed without touching Medicare, Bowles said.
Politicians say they want to trim spending, “except the thing that’s important to them,” he said. “This doesn’t get easier; it gets harder when you let every interest group say, ‘Don’t touch my program.’ ”
Entitlements are particularly tricky. Millions of people paid taxes into the system to qualify for the benefits, and the programs are credited with lifting millions out of poverty.
Though experts hope that a recent spike in food stamps and other anti-poverty efforts will level off as the economy improves, most of the increases in federal spending have been in Medicare and Medicaid.
“Our increased spending isn’t necessarily a case of waste or of Congress spending like drunken sailors. It’s happening because providing an increasingly expensive service to an increasing number of people is increasingly expensive,” said Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a budget-research group.
And it’s predicted to grow more as baby boomers overwhelm the system.
Federal benefit programs pack a powerful political punch.
“We all hear, ‘My opponent will cut your Medicare. Grandma is going to be eating cat food,’ ” Bixby said. “One of the reasons that it’s difficult to hold a good, honest discussion about these programs is because the changes are so easily demagogued.”
All spending has its champions, said Steve Ellis, the chief budget analyst for the nonpartisan anti-spending group Taxpayers for Common Sense.
“The spending didn’t get there out of nowhere. Somebody pushed for it at some time,” he said.
Spending often begets more spending. Despite reports of inefficiencies and redundancies, Ellis said only a few costly military weapons programs have been eliminated, including the Comanche helicopter and an engine for the Joint Strike Fighter.
“And it took a lot of blood, sweat and tears, years of work and years of fighting,” Ellis said. “There are a lot of moneyed interests behind all these programs.”
Ellis and other analysts said the sheer volume of the federal budget and the litany of programs also serve to perpetuate spending.
“Programs are funded because they were funded before,” Ellis said. “No one stops to ask whether or not there’s still a need for it.”
Written By: Lesley Clark and Cynthia Sewell
Original Publication URL: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/12/19/2385993/nearly-50-percentof-americans.html
Discussion
Weekly Email
