AN ENTITLEMENT CULTURE

• First, consider the recent announcement by the Obama administration that it would do an end run around the COLA for Social Security recipients.  COLA represents the cost of living adjustment for Social Security recipients that occurs annually to deal with inflation.  Because inflation is relatively low, there was no COLA scheduled this year.  But our president decided to grant one anyway—a $250 payment for each Social Security recipient.  With tongue in cheek, George Will writes that “Barack Obama has now established. . . Social Security’s COLA as the capstone to the architecture of the entitlement culture that is modern liberalism’s crowning achievement:  IT is an entitlement to which you are entitled even when you are not entitled to it.  Obama says that 57 million Americans—every Social Security beneficiary and some other recipients of federal entitlements—are entitled to $250 apiece to assuage the disappointment of having not been uninjured by inflation.  Because the cost of living declined 4% last year, the 57 million are not entitled to the actual COLA, but they evidently are going to be declared entitled to monetary consolation for the misfortune of not experiencing misfortune.”  How will he pay for this?  Our president has no intention of offsetting this new entitlement benefit in any manner except by borrowing.  Will again writes:  “The money will be borrowed, much of it from abroad, much of that portion from China.  Fortunately, foreigners have unlimited appetites for lending to America.  Don’t they?”  I find it quite unbelievable that our nation is continuing to buy into this entitlement culture so voraciously.  The example of the COLA is a small one compared to the health care costs or even to Medicare.  But I find it staggering that there has been no protest over this; there has been no debate over this; there is no one raising the red flag—“wait a minute; we are only following the COLA law.  Social Security is not to receive a COLA increase because that is the law.  There was a decrease in the cost of living by $5 and the law mandates no COLA.”  The entitlement culture does not blink an eye at this because that is what entitlement means.  “We are entitled to this even though we are not really entitled to this.”  Such logic is the road to financial ruin—the very road America is now traveling.  See George Will in the Washington Post (22 October 2009).

• Second, we must see the health care legislation now in its final stages as the formation of another entitlement that will ultimately be funded by the US government.  Columnist Michael Gerson writes that “it is not cynical for Republicans [or anyone else for that matter] to recognize the ideological stakes that Obama has raised.  The passage of a massive health entitlement would change the relationship of Americans to their government.  On the evidence of nations such as England, a national health system places a conservative party at a permanent ideological disadvantage.  Every proposal for tax reductions is attacked as undermining the eternally hungry public health system.  Every failure of that system becomes an excuse for greater spending and government involvement.  The tide of government grows, and the ebb weakens, until no one can fight the flood.”  Further, the current legislation Congress is considering will expand health-care access, but it does little to address the issue of cost inflation.  The Congressional Budget Office estimates that health costs under this new entitlement program will grow at about 8% a year—higher than the growth of the economy or of government revenue.  For that reason, as Gerson points out, the Medicare costs assumed by the Finance Committee are dishonest.  “A future Congress is required to display remarkable, politically suicidal heroism—to impose a 25% cut in Medicare reimbursements to doctors in 2011—which everyone, literally everyone, knows will not happen.”  The facts are that this new program will actually cost more than $1 trillion and add to the deficit that our current president has already tripled.  This is quite frankly an unsustainable system.  History tells us that Congress vows to cut Medicare costs and then regularly defers them.  Furthermore, during the Bush presidency the Republican-controlled Congress passed a prescription drug entitlement that was not offset by either spending cuts or tax increases.  That entitlement will cost the US more than $1 trillion in this decade, including the interest on the necessary borrowing to fund it.  The entitlement culture is now deeply entrenched in the American political culture—and it is neither a Democratic nor a Republican issue.  Both parties are to blame and both parties are in effect bankrupting America.  The Bible speaks often of the wise becoming fools; that is what we are now experiencing in our culture.  We are being ruled by very foolish leaders.  May God have mercy on us.

See George Will in the Washington Post (22 October and 18 October 2009) and Michael Gerson in the Washington Post (21 October 2009).  

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