Free Republic

Social Security will spend more than it collects this year, the program’s trustees said Tuesday, marking the first time in more than 35 years that it will run an annual deficit as it slides toward insolvency by 2034. Medicare’s main trust fund is in even worse shape, scheduled to hit insolvency in 2026 — three years earlier than last year’s estimate, the trustees said. The twin warnings add even more pressure to a budget already strained by last year’s tax cuts and this year’s deal to boost spending on defense and basic domestic needs, leaving few bright spots in the...

Last May, this page called on the presidential candidates to engage in a serious debate on the federal budget deficit, now $415 billion, compared with the $236 billion surplus when President Bush took office four years ago. What has emerged instead is a pair of dueling tax plans, each of them inadequate to support its candidate's vision of government. President Bush is fixated on making his ill-conceived tax cuts permanent and creating new tax shelters for affluent investors. Senator John Kerry's tax agenda raises money for the government by repealing Mr. Bush's tax cuts for high-income earners, an idea we...