WASHINGTON — The lack of spending cuts in legislation that averted the fiscal cliff will place enormous pressure on entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and even the president’s new heath insurance plan when negotiations begin in coming weeks to reduce the deficit, analysts said Wednesday.
The legislation passed this week delayed by two months the implementation of automatic across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending. Now President Obama and Republicans are hoping to use that breathing room to come up with specific cuts, which could affect an array of social programs that are vital to many lower and middle-income Americans.
Comments
We need a better economy and more jobs, which in turn brings in more revenue and gets people off government assistance. Along with SS, medicare and Medicaid, we now spend 750 billion a year on 83 welfare programs, more than defense.
It is relatively easy to call for lower taxes and lower spending. It is a lot more difficult to discuss specific programs. A cut in Medicare is a cut for the healthcare industry. It translates into fewer jobs, lower income for doctors, and, over time, lower capital expenditures in healthcare. I will be interested to see who stands up in Congress and asks for that.
While we are cutting Medicare, we can cut Medicaid and Obamacare sending more people to the ER and onto the bad debt roles of hospitals. Who is going to ask for that?
Raising the retirement age is not going to create more jobs for young people. We already have retirees working in retirement and taking jobs that younger people could fill. Who wants more of that?
The discussion on cuts will be very interesting. Hopefully, they will tackle loopholes first so that they don't plunge America into the 19th century.
I believe that we just don't have the leadership to make specific cuts ( knocking both Dem & Repubs). Best we can hope for is a blanket across the board cut.
The current cost of these programs is already a huge piece of the pie in the government budget. The much greater concern is their rate of growth due to demographics and number of people expecting their piece. The ratios of what people have paid into the various systems vs what they expect out is out of balance, as are the ratios of people supporting the system vs those drawing out. We won't have enough trees to make $100 bills to support the system at some point.
The growth of the programs will make the debt from recent wars look like chump change. The just passed fiscal cliff bill actually increased debt by about 4 trillion. And discouraging to note the pork that was added. Items added to it give breaks to movie, windmill, booze companies! At a time we are trying to eliminate this. If politicians can't ignore lobbying for pork, taxpayers can take take things into their own hands and not buy products like rum and movie tickets. Make pork too expensive for companies to pursue.
But liberals care about us
I've been waiting for liberals to wake up to this! You can't keep all these entitlement programs AND continue to run trillion dollar deficits. No matter how much you cry about cutting spending, it's a house of cards that's all going to collapse and really hurt the poor the most.
and the economy continues to bump on the ground as shown by todays employment numbers.