To be brutally honest, even if it is likely to get me into a lot of trouble, the baby boomer generation has created a looming fiscal crisis which could bring the United States economy to its knees if measures aren’t taken to deal with the trillions of dollars of deficits and the mountain of public debt that have accumulated over the years the baby boomers have presided over our country’s economy. I am talking about the runaway spending of mandatory programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and veteran benefits, which is 70 percent of the entire budget of the federal government, excluding interest on the federal debt.
Let’s take a look at the numbers to see why it’s impossible to ignore the colossal increase in the size of these entitlement programs. In 2023, the entire federal budget was $5.4 trillion excluding interest, of which $3.8 trillion was mandatory spending or entitlements. Discretionary spending was $1.7 trillion, which included everything other than entitlements and interest on the debt. Our interest cost is running around $700 billion, almost as much as our defense budget and approximately 40 percent of the discretionary budget.
In order to bring down our annual deficit, which is now almost $2 trillion a year (yes, that’s trillion with a T), it doesn’t take a genius to see that we cannot substantially lower this number by only cutting discretionary spending or increasing taxes.