Autopilot To Ruin

The Washington Post today points out the awkward fact that politicians are refusing to address: entitlement spending is out of control and on autopilot, heading rapidly toward ruin. There is a proposal on the table to make politicians actually have to face up to the facts. While the Post is unsure whether the idea would work, they think it is at least worth a look - because just continuing along the same path we are on is not at all a good idea.

Last week an impressive and ideologically diverse collection of economists and budget experts proposed an intriguing mechanism for forcing lawmakers — and the next president — to focus on the problem. The group, whose members come from think tanks ranging from the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute to the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, would take Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid off autopilot growth and require lawmakers to set 30-year budgets. These would be reviewed every five years to determine whether the costs are set to remain within the allotted limits. If not, there would be automatic adjustments — the experts' paper doesn't specify what those would be — unless lawmakers acted to override this trigger.

This is not, and was not intended to be, a solution to the problem of runaway entitlement spending. The group, not surprisingly given its ideological scope, does not offer answers to the toughest questions: What should the spending levels be? What benefits should be cut, taxes raised or provider payments reduced? Rather, the paper offers a mechanism to force Congress and the president to face up to these difficult policy choices. There are legitimate worries about whether this mechanism would function as intended. Tax breaks, too, are on an automatic course; why not require that they be revisited as well? Would the trigger mechanism really work — or would lawmakers just vote to waive the limits ?

If nothing is done, the retirement of the baby boomers is set to raise entitlement spending to more than the entire current Federal budget. The entire paper can be downloaded from the Brookings website. As always with any proposal of this kind, the devil will be in the details. But it certainly is a starting point on a long overdue dialog on entitlement spending.