Suppose that President Obama announced tomorrow that he was going to increase spending on the military by an amount equal to 10 percent of GDP ($1.5 trillion a year or $6 trillion over the course of his presidency). This would not affect USA Today's calculation of debt burdens at all. Suppose that he announced that he would eliminate the corporate income tax and institute a special zero tax bracket for incomes over $100,000. This would also increase annual deficits by about $1.5 trillion. This change also would not affect the deficit as highlighted by USA Today in a front page story. USA Today's deficit does not take account at all of projections of future income tax revenue or projected spending in most government programs. It only considers commitments to a narrow set of retirement programs and Medicare and it only counts the projected payments of taxes designated for these programs by people already in these programs. This gives a really huge number to scare people with, but it has virtually no meaning whatsoever. If you think this is the burden passed on to our kids, you would be mistaken. As soon as our kids start working, say a summer job for a high school kid, they become part of the problem. They are among the people to whom the debt is owed. In fact, the 16 year-old would be a huge contributor to the problem since the projected value of his or her Social Security and Medicare swamps the projected cost of these programs for people in their fifties and sixties. The long and short is that USA Today wants to scare you into supporting big cuts in government social programs. It is easy to show using normal arithmetic that these programs are easily affordable if we fix health care. If we don't fix health care then the programs are not affordable, but we will also have wrecked our economy, so who cares about the programs. Anyhow, serious people focus on fixing health care. USA Today and its horror show crew whine about big deficit numbers to scare people.
--Dean Baker
