Eleanor Clift of Newsweek asks the sixty-four dollar question: What about Medicare? But she addresses more than just Medicare in an interesting column that centers around Senator Kent Conrad, a Democrat from North Dakota.
Conrad is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee. According to Clift, Conrad has been willing to tell the President the bad news:
Without revealing details of the conversation, Conrad says Bush is right to be concerned about the long-term shortfall in Social Security funding, but the shortfall in Medicare is eight times worse, and Bush isn't campaigning to overhaul Medicare. "We're heading for a financial cliff," Conrad told NEWSWEEK. Between the massive budget deficits, Bush's proposals to make his tax cuts permanent, spending more for the war and borrowing more for Social Security, "It doesn't add up." What Conrad wants is a broadened discussion of the country's fiscal problems to include not only Social Security and Medicare but the budget deficit and the tax system.
Clift then relates the following figures:
Conrad reels off the dire facts. The comptroller general, a Republican, who heads the nonpartisan General Accounting Office, came to see him this week to inform him that the government's long-term unfunded liability is $46 trillion dollars. That's a 75-year number if it makes anybody feel better, and it includes Social Security, Medicare, pensions — everything the feds owe the citizenry. It's hard to get your arms around these numbers, but it will take $11 trillion to fund Bush's tax cuts while the Social Security shortfall is $3.7 trillion over the same 75-year span. In other words, Bush's tax cuts are roughly three times the size of the Social Security shortfall.
But here's the kicker:
Conrad has made this case repeatedly to Bush's top advisers, telling Glenn Hubbard, Bush's economic advisor, and John Snow, the Treasury secretary, just this week that he thought Thomas's view about needing to address these things together is right. "I don't think you can solve this one at a time," says Conrad. "They listened attentively. That's all I know. I can't divine other people's motives. I pay attention to actions, and the actions have been to explode the deficits and debt. The logic leads ultimately to dramatic cuts in Social Security and Medicare."
(The Thomas in question is Republican Bill Thomas, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. I blogged about him in an earlier post.)
Well, hell, since I'm an unelected, unaccountable blogger, I'm perfectly happy to divine the motives of the people in the White House.
The Bushies are knowingly pursuing a strategy that they hope will reward them in the short term — their wealthy supporters get to keep their tax cuts; and private accounts funded by deficit spending will not only pour huge amounts of money into the stock market, but might also create a new, grateful constituency that will express its gratitude by voting for the GOP — and that will also force future cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
Don't forget that President Bush requested, and then received, a prescription benefit for Medicare slated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It won't be funded by new taxes, but by even more deficit spending. That shows how much the President cares about unfunded liabilities. Piling up even more of them through the creation of private accounts is the part of the same game plan.
The Bushies and their supporters know that they can never actually achieve their desired Social Security and Medicare spending cuts in an honest, democratic manner. Furthermore, they fully understand that these cuts eventually follow from the logic of their actions. What could possibly be plainer to them, especially if Senator Conrad explains it to them on a regular basis? That's precisely why they're doing what they're doing.
In short, the logic of their actions reveals the motives behind those actions.
