The Homa Files

Punch line: In a series of adios speeches, Defense Secretary Gates speaks a consistent refrain: America can be a superpower or a welfare state, but not both..

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Excerpted from WSJ:

“The reality is that the entitlement state is crowding out national defense.

What’s really happening now is “entitlement overstretch”.

The American entitlement state was born with the New Deal, got fat with the Great Society of the 1960s and hit another growth spurt in the first two years of the Obama era.

The big three entitlements — Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, plus other retirement and disability expenses — accounted for 4.9% of GDP by 1970, eclipsed defense spending in 1976 and stood at 9.8% as of last year.

Under current projections, entitlements will eat up 10.8% of GDP by 2020, while defense spending goes down to 2.7%.”

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Ken’s Take: Note the “secret” to how Clinton was able to balance the budget – simply cut defense & intelligence spending and hope for sustained peace.

Oops.

This entry was posted on June 2, 2011 at 6:05 am and is filed under Budget - Deficit, Entitlements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.