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Social Security will soon be insolvent, and over the last three decades Congress has done nothing to fix the problem. From the outset, Social Security has been challenged by a “fiscal commitment problem," whereby solvency is a serious long-term problem without significant short-term consequences.
Medicare is a vital program for seniors, but is fundamentally unaffordable as it is currently structured because it faces an unfunded obligation of $85.6 trillion. Phasing out the subsidy forupper-income seniors is an obvious first step toward Medicaresustainability. Such a policy would reduce Medicare's long-runexcess costs by over $41 trillion.
Improper accounting for Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s budgetary impact has created the illusory effect that the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) represent a free lunch for Washington, which is encouraging higher spending and harming efforts to eliminate the entities.
The Index of Dependence on Government measures the growth in spending on dependence-creating programs that supplant the role of civil society. Dependence on government in the U.S. rose again in 2011, the year of the most recently available data, and which is principally assessed by this report. A solid majority of Americans polled by Rasmussen believe that government dependence is too high. In a September 2013 poll, 67 percent of adults nationwide said that too many Americans are dependent on the government.[1]
For the next generation of taxpayers and retirees, there is no better option than Medicare premium support. It will guarantee better choices and broader access to quality care, faster innovation, less waste and fraud, and superior cost control.