![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.halepassage.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/cbo-three-mountains-deficits.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe single best graph on what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s driving our deficits<\/a>.<\/p>\n “That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all of the federal government\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s spending in three graphs. The top graph is health care, including Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. The middle graph is Social Security. And then there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s literally everything else: Defense, education, infrastructure, food safety, R&D, farm subsidies, the FBI, etc.<\/p>\n What these three charts tell you is simple: It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all about health care. Spending on Social Security is expected to rise, but not particularly quickly. Spending on everything else is actually falling. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s health care that contains most all of our future deficit problems. And the situation is even worse than it looks on this graph: Private health spending is racing upwards even faster than public health spending, so the problem the federal government is showing in its budget projections is mirrored on the budgets of every family and business that purchases health insurance.<\/p>\n These graphs are built atop what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the current policy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d baseline. The current policy baseline assumes nothing changes. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t pass any new laws. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t follow through on the hard parts \u00e2\u20ac\u201d like the cost controls in the Affordable Care Act \u00e2\u20ac\u201d of any of the laws we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve already passed. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t raise taxes.<\/p>\n That won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work for very long. Page 9 of the report includes this remarkable statistic: If we just continue on the way we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going, then \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spending for Social Security, Medicare, other major health programs, defense, and interest payments\u00e2\u20ac\u009d will \u00e2\u20ac\u0153nearly equal all of the government\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s revenues in 2020 and would exceed them from 2022 onward \u00e2\u20ac\u201d leaving no revenues to cover any other federal activities, such as income security programs, retirement benefits for federal civilian and military employees, transportation, research, education, law enforcement, and many other programs.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n So we need to get health-care costs down. But because we can only do that so quickly, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re also going to need to get taxes up.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The single best graph on what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s driving our deficits. “That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all of the federal government\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s spending in three graphs. The top graph is health care, including Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. The middle graph is Social Security. … Continue reading