The problem today, and surely FDR must be rolling in his grave, is that people refuse to oblige the state by dying at a reasonable age. Where once people routinely expired long before they could collect a single dime of government benefits , now the selfish bastards live many years beyond the time when a good citizen, if he really cared about the financial solvency of his nation, would sheepishly shuffle off his mortal coil to avoid offending anyone. In the United States, most of our socialism is for the elderly and they are voracious consumers of it, everything from Medicare to Social Security, the rich bounty of which many reap in excess to the contributions they have made when they were productive citizens back when Nixon was President. It's a serious problem. The projected cost of supplying just medical care to the elderly is estimated to be around 40 trillion dollars in the next fifteen years. That's 40 trillion dollars, most of which we do not have and yet are legally obliged to pay as Medicare, like Jehovah, lives in the Holy of Holies and death will strike down the blasphemer who dares suggest that we cut back on the burnt offerings.
Cut back we must. There is no way to pay this huge and rapidly growing sum. No way at all. Socialism in the United States (and everywhere else), as it is depends on a large pool of young workers paying the benefits for a small group or beneficiaries who play shuffleboard, totter around the house, and then obliging die before they can make too many demands on the system, is unsustainable. People are just living too long with too many medical problems all of which need to be carefully managed at great expense to ensure their ability to continue to use finite resources. A bit of a Catch-22 situation, I mean looking at it from a cold-blooded economic perspective.
It's not that I am against taking care of the elderly. I'm all for it. I am just pointing out that shortly, very shortly, the decision not only to do it but to what extent is going to be taken out of our hands by two of the major principles of economics, first that nobody works for free and second, that you can't pay for things forever with money you don't have. You can borrow for a while but eventually your creditors will catch on that you cannot possibly pay them and the ride on the artificial prosperity train is over. One way or another we are heading for extreme rationing of medical care, either overtly or covertly, because there is no money to pay for unlimited access to all the health care you can eat. Surely our elected leaders know this but still not only promise to maintain the current levels of medical care to those already eating from the public trough but to extend similar benefits to everyone else. There is no money. We cannot add another 40 trillion to the projected deficit with impunity. The government does have other obligations, you know. Like defense, infrastructure, and the other traditional roles of government in free societies.
