They are connected. We have had the five highest annual deficits in our history over the past five years, which has resulted in the national debt going from $10.4 trillion to $17.3 trillion. Even at artificially restrained interest rates, we are incurring close to $225 billion dollars a year in debt servicing costs. If interest rates return to historical rates, we could be paying nearly a trillion dollars a year in debt servicing costs.
The place to have these fights is before the money is spent, not when the bill comes due.
The Senate didn't pass a budget for Obama's first four years. SS and Medicare are not part of the annual budget process. They are the biggest drivers of our debt. They need be reformed. The average person receiving Medicare gets three time out in benefits than he contributes in payments.
This graph shows that the average man and woman (average defined in the study as average income over their working lives and living to the average life expectancy) who start receiving benefits in 2010 get over 3 times more in benefits than they pay in to the system! Of importance, the study accounts for inflation by calculating all past taxes and future payments in 2010 dollars to provide an accurate comparison.
If the notion that Medicare recipients are simply "getting back what they paid in" is false then where is the money coming from? Simply, the excess received is being borrowed from younger generations and the cost is more than we can bear.
We are constantly reminded of the government's inability to manage a budget under the arbitrary debt ceiling (raised 80 times since 1940) and that the national "on budget" debt is over $17T. The debt conversation all too often omits the "off budget" debt that includes underfunded liabilities to Social Security and Medicare which is about $110T according to a Forbes article; totaling more than $900K per working American.
You wouldn’t run your household finances this way, and we cannot allow our representatives to run the country this way.
Who is defending that? You seem to miss the point that it is one thing to identify a problem and another to find a solution to it. As much as you want to stomp your foot and get red in the face, you provide no real solution. Government spending will increase just due to the demographics of an aging population. And you can add medical costs that are increasing faster than inflation and the GDP.
The debt of the U.S. government has increased by $2.678 trillion in the 2.5 years since House Speaker John Boehner (R.-Ohio) completed his first deal to put legislation increasing the debt limit through a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
On Aug. 2, 2011, President Barack Obama signed legislation, approved by the Boehner-led House, permitting the Treasury to increase the debt by $900 billion. Since then, the debt limit has been repeatedly suspended by legislation that needed to pass through the Republican-controlled House.
The House once again passed legislation to suspend the debt limit—this time through March 15, 2015, which is after November’s mid-term congressional elections.
We have suspended the debt limit for several years. We no longer have a debt limit. Obama has a credit card with no limits. The Reps have given up any leverage they have to force some reforms of the entitlement programs.