Whispers from the Government Drawing Room

Spending on national defense, adjusted for inflation and population, was 42% higher in 2008 than in 1965. Spending for routinely accepted government activity (parks, NASA, embassies, courts, prisons and the like) were 76% higher. Both, in other words, grew far less rapidly than the economy or federal revenues — both of which were about 150% higher in 2008 than in 1965. But welfare-state expenditures were 583% higher. In fact, the welfare state became the core of the federal government, growing from 26% of federal outlays in 1965 to 61% in 2008. When the House Ways and Means Committee drafted Medicare in 1965, it predicted that the hospital-insurance part of the program would cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual figure was $67 billion. In 1987, Congress anticipated that a federal program to assist hospitals serving large numbers of Medicaid patients would require $1 billion by 1992. The final figure: $17 billion. (From IBD)

There are many topics in our "national conversation" that are expressed primarily in body language and innuendo, never in sentences or paragraphs. It is reminiscent of parents talking in front of their children about sex. There are apparently some political facts of life we are simply not mature enough to know. Here is one: The growth of the welfare state will soon outstrip the ability of working people to support it. The transfer of money from productive people to nonproductive people can not be maintained much longer. The recent crisis in the economy was caused by cheap money, terrible business and governmental decisions, irresponsibility and fraud but the crisis itself was unrelated to the basic underlying problem of the welfare state expansion; the artificial expansion of the economy actually may have artificially delayed the crisis. The immediate solution is to take more money from working people and give less money to welfare programs. Then more and less. And more and less. Until...until what?