Obamacare a 2.5 Trillion Dollar NEW Entitlement

Excerpts from the Heritage Foundation article dated 3/10/2010

In theory, the federal government has $2.5 trillion stashed away in a nondescript office building in the sleepy little town of Parkersburg, West Virginia. That is where the Treasury Department keeps stacks of nonnegotiable Treasury bonds payable to the Social Security Administration. But as the Associated Press reported yesterday, for the first time since the 1980s, the federal government will not be adding to that stack. Thanks to an aging population and slow economy, Social Security will pay out $29 billion more this year than it takes in. The Congressional Budget Office reports that after small surpluses in 2014 and 2015, the program is projected to be in the red from 2016 until forever.

But what about Al Gore's Social Security "Lock Box?" Can't we just spend that $2.5 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund? As Heritage experts David John and Brian Reidl explain, since 1939 federal law has required Social Security to "invest" its extra money in Treasury bonds. Those bonds are really just IOUs from the government to the government. The feds already spent that $2.5 trillion long ago on programs such as education, foreign aid and defense. Add the $2.5 trillion Social Security obligation onto our other obligations and our current national debt stands at $12.5 trillion, or nearly $42,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

The leftist majorities in Congress and the White House are not listening. Instead of reining in federal spending and tackling our existing Entitlement crisis, they are locked in an all out push to create a brand new $2.5 trillion health care entitlement. The President may say his plan is deficit neutral, but the American people do not believe him. And they are wise not to. The President tries to pay for his plan with over half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts over the next decade.

The president's own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports that these cuts would cause one-fifth of all health care providers to go bankrupt.

Reducing our entitlement obligations is the only way to prevent our nation from becoming another Greece. We need to: Show these programs' long-term obligations in the budget; target these programs to only those who that need them; and strengthen personal responsibility by making it easier for people to build personal retirement savings and use health care savings accounts. But first we must avoid the fiscal insanity that is Obamacare.