They are both welfare, wealth redistribution schemes. The revenue collected to pay for Medicare is not enough to pay for the benefits. By law, 75% of the benefits for Parts B and D come from the General Fund. Medicare represents an unfunded liability of $38 trillion.
The states pay about 50% of the Medicaid costs. Medicaid represents about 22% of state budgets--this includes the federal share.
See, I think it’s important. When people say “let’s eliminate all welfare programs”, Medicaid represents $333B that can be cut immediately, while Medicare can only be tweaked over a number of years.
Medicaid includes the CHIPS program. 7% of Medicaid recipients also receive Medicare. They are the most indigent and poor among us, most folks in nursuing homes and with serious disabilities. The idea that there is the political will in this country to cut all federal funding for Medicaid is laughable. It is not realistic. And Obamacare adds another 18 million to the Medicaid rolls.
From your charts, I can’t tell how much is spent on HUD, FoodStamps, TANF, Crop Subsidies, Flood Insurance, and all the other programs for freeloaders.
The other mandatories include the 44 million on food stamps, unemployment benefits, etc. HUD is the discretion part along with almost all government departments and agencies including NSA, the CIA, State Department, etc. And although the chart shows DOD separately, that is also discretionary.
also can’t tell how much of the $689B for DOD is for current and retired troops — which I think should be inviolable — and how much is for bases in South Korea, Japan, Philipines, Germany, etc. — which I might opt to close unless the host country is willing to pay their costs. I seem to remember Glenn Beck coming up with $300B in DOD cuts and I’d like to see all the numbers to see how many I’d agree with.,
Operation and Maintenance--$283.3 billion; Military Personnel--$154.2 billion; Procurement--$140.1 billion; Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation--$79.1 billion; Military Construction--$23.9 billion; Family Housing--$3.1 billion;
Note: The countries where we have our biggest and most numeous bases already pay us cost offsets as part of burden sharing agreements. We can always try to up those amounts.The Japanese pay us about $2 billion a year. Japan agreed to absorb 100 percent of the cost of Japanese nationals employed at U.S. military facilities and to pay for all utilities supplied to U.S. bases, to increase the amount of military and family housing construction that it is providing to support U.S. forces, to continue to provide facilities at no charge to the United States and to waive taxes and fees that might otherwise apply to U.S. activities.
You see, without the details I don’t buy the “it can’t be done all in one year” argument. Any serious attempt to eliminate the deficit needs the line items involved. Pretending the budget only has SIX categories of spending and labeling them “Mandatory”,”SS”,”Medicare”, etc. is a ploy to shut down discussion of cutting.
You see, the details are not necessary to grasp the big picture and my point that we can't balance our budget in one year. To set unrealistic goals is not a good strategy. And if you try to take a meat ax to the budget by cutting all of Medicaid for instance, there will be no political support to take such actions. By 2030, one in five residents of this country will be 65 or older--twice what it is now. There will be two workers for every retiree. The entitlement programs are the drivers of our debt and will increasingly do so as our society ages. Unless we reform Medicare and SS, both unsustainable as currently structured, we will go bankrupt.
WRT Medicaid vs. Medicare: “They are both welfare, wealth redistribution schemes.”
And yet, one is an entitlement and the other is pure welfare. What do I mean ? Although Medicare doesn’t pay back according to what any individual contributed, people feel entitled to it because they DID contribute to it to some degree. Just as with SS, people feel they paid in and are therefor entitled to the benefit while it is government mismanagement and hence government’s problem to provide what was promised. Contrast this to Medicaid where the recipients contributed nothing. The political will does not exist to cut Medicare benefits because it is a true entitlement, but that is not true for Medicaid where nobody paid into it and nobody is entitled to anything from it. If you were to list out every line item in the budget and ask the people to prioritize them with the understanding that the items beyond the actual tax revenue for the previous year would simply be eliminated, Medicaid, Foodstamps, Foreign Aid, etc. would be at the bottom of the list and be eliminated by default.
We have to insist that people see the separate parts so they can make the distinction between welfare and entitlements. Lumping them together lends legitimacy to welfare programs that a majority of Americans would dump if they were asked to prioritize all expenses.