Yet More Whining About Entitlements at the Post

Okay folks, get your checkbooks out. The people who pledged a CEPR contribution for every Post article/column whining about entitlements owe us money. This one is from Bob Kerrey and Warren Rudman, the co-chairs of the Concord Coalition. In addition to conflating Social Security and Medicare as �entitlements� that will pose problems, the column also has a few other standard scare tactics. For example, it projects a rise in spending from approximately 20 percent of GDP at present to 40 percent in 30 years. The biggest part of this rise is due to a rising interest burden. See, if we run larger deficits, and Congress never responds by either raising taxes and/or cutting spending, then we get a rising interest burden. Silly trick, but this is the Post. And of course, the article never discusses health care reform as something that should be on the national agenda. Do the authors not know that the U.S. spends more than twice as much per person on health care as the average among other wealthy countries? Do these great publicly minded authorities not realize that we are the only country that has such a problem with exploding health care costs? The fact that the Post prints this stuff would not be so bad if they would occasionally allow an opposing view. They don�t. The Taliban Times will run a picture of the prophet Muhammad in a compromising position before the Post ever runs a column explaining that there is no �entitlement crisis,� just a broken U.S. health care system.