to our creditors. Put another way, one out of every
six dollars that Americans now pay in taxes essentially gets thrown into the trash; it goes to pay interest on the debt, not to buy anything. By 2035, the CBO projects that 22%
of Americans’ tax payments won’t go toward buying anything. Most autopilot spending, however,
doesn’t go toward interest payments on the debt. Most goes toward Social Security and, especially, federal healthcare programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare. The former should be viewed very differently from the latter. Social Security was designed with
a dedicated revenue stream, Social Security payroll taxes, that has more than covered the program’s total costs over the past roughly 90 years. Yes, Social Security is expensive
($1.6 trillion this year), and it badly needs some relatively slight reforms, namely, slowly and incrementally raising the retirement age to reflect current demographic realities, to keep
us from having to dip into general revenues to pay for it. But it’s not driving the deficit train. Federal healthcare programs are the primary driver of
our debt, as they are eating up huge and ever-increasing portions of our general tax revenues. This is because when President Lyndon Johnson spearheaded the passage of these Great Society programs and a Democrat Congress passed them into law, no one bothered to think much about how to pay for them. This is very different from Social Security. Indeed, only about one-third of Medicare’s costs
are covered by Medicare payroll taxes, and none of Medicaid’s costs are covered through payroll taxes. This is why LBJ deserves the place of honor on the Mount Rushmore of debt. As I have written previously, “The first year that
Medicare spending visibly hit the books was 1967. From that point through 2020, Medicare and Medicaid cost a combined $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.” As bad as that problem has been, however, it’s
getting worse. In 1975, on the eve of the Bicentennial, we spent 7%
of all federal tax revenues on Medicare and Medicaid combined. In 2025, on the eve of the Quarter-Millennial,
we’re spending 31% of all federal tax revenues on just those two programs. By 2035, the CBO says we’ll be spending 35% — more
than all discretionary spending combined, including all spending on defense, parks, highways, and everything else for which Congress appropriates funds through the usual budgetary process. In the face of these federal healthcare programs’ escalating costs, federal debt held by the public — the portion of the national debt that really matters, as it doesn’t involve the federal government merely borrowing money from itself — is now a whopping 14 times higher, even after adjusting for inflation, than it was in 1974. Lest anyone think that debt numbers can only go in
one direction, that’s after we had cut our debt held by the public in half, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from the end of fiscal year 1946 to the end of FY 1974. We were halfway to being debt-free. Then Medicare and Medicaid really kicked in, and our
debt skyrocketed. With autopilot spending now eating up more than
100% of our tax revenues, and with federal healthcare programs consuming the largest share of that autopilot spending, we won’t be able to get a handle on our runaway deficit spending until we get serious about reforming those healthcare programs. As things stand now, our autopilot is set to fly the
country into the ground. In recent years, Republicans have been only marginally
serious about addressing the deficit, and Democrats have been almost wholly unserious about doing so. This wasn’t the case as recently as 25 or 30 years ago. To turn the debt battleship around, we need to revisit
that late 1990s playbook. The need to get our deficits and debt under control is
obvious and pressing. As recently as 2008, when Barack Obama and Joe
Biden were running as a ticket for the White House, the largest inflation-adjusted deficits on record were, as one would expect, those we ran up during the three full fiscal years of World War II (1943, 1944, and 1945). They now rank 14th, 15th, and 16th on the all-time
list, and they’ll fall another spot once FY 2025 is finished. That’s right: We now run higher annual deficits on a routine basis, even after adjusting for inflation, than we did while fighting a two-front world war. So, we need DOGE, but we also need a lot more than
DOGE. We need serious statesmen to emerge to prevent a fiscal calamity.
Jeffrey H. Anderson is president of American Main Street Initiative, and was director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2017-2021. This article first appeared in The American Mind.
JUNE 2025 | NEWSMAX 25
SIGN REMOVAL/KAYLA BARTKOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES / CONGRESS/WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100
