Entitlements: Life is not a defined benefit

The GAO chappies issued a report on the nation’s entitlements recently, according to Star Parker.  They described the situation as a party on the beach while the “tsunami” gets ever closer.

You can get the same idea by taking a look at usgovernmentspending.com.  It shows unmistakably how big entitlement programs sit on top of the government spending pile, crowding everything else out. Here’s the story for 2008.

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United States Federal, State,
and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2008
Amounts in billions of dollars

Change View:		Fed	Gov. Xfer	State	Local	Total
Pensions		730.7	0.0	146.0	33.4	910.0
Health Care		672.3	-293.7	416.8	121.1	916.5
Education		92.8	-93.7	272.3	565.3	836.7
Defense		689.9	0.0	2.1	0.0	692.0
Welfare		262.7	-38.8	125.5	87.0	436.4
Protection		47.0	0.0	79.7	169.9	296.6
Transportation		79.3	-48.0	95.5	113.7	240.5
General Government		20.7	-0.8	32.4	50.8	103.1
Interest		261.3	0.0	37.4	49.4	348.1
All Other Spending		45.3	-48.0	15.2	288.6	301.1
Total Spending		2901.9	-523.0	1223.0	1479.2	5081.1
Spending: actual, budgeted, estimated, guesstimated source: usgovernmentspending.com

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There they are, those three biggies: Pensions, Health Care, and Education, the big three entitlements that the government gives us for free, or in return for our taxes.

Parker has an interesting way of writing about this.  The welfare state treats life as a defined benefit, she says.

Trouble is, of course, it isn’t. Like the defined benefits that the auto workers voted themselves half a century ago, it’s all going to hit the buffers, because, not surprisingly, we voted for a lot more in defined benefit than we could ever afford.

But the entitlements crisis isn’t a government crisis, or an economic crisis. 

The entitlements crisis is a moral crisis and we ought to grasp that ownership is part of the "values" agenda. Life is not a defined benefit.

There is another way, of course, but we probably won’t get off the beach until it’s too late, like those vacationers unfortunate vacationsers in Phuket, Thailand, in December 2004.