Cross-posted from Unbossed
Bush makes a big stink about the date that Social Security will go into deficit. His point is that it will then be a huge drain on the government's budget. This is the whole reason he's been going to the Treasury and talking about the "IOU's" in the file cabinet. He's focusing on the date that Social Security goes into deficit, in 2017, and how it put our national budget at risk.
Let's just see what that "drain" will look like, compared to Bush's other spending habits. This should prove just how dishonest Bush is in his argument. Here's the projected Social Security deficit, compared to our projected overall budget deficit, as a percentage of GDP:
See where the line crosses in 2017, and that tiny little sliver that it creates? That's the "drain" that Bush is so concerned about. Bush wants you to ignore that big gold area. He just wants to focus on that tiny sliver there in the bottom right, and call it a huge "crisis". That's how dishonest he is. He not only ignores the size of the general budget deficit, but adds to it. Then he ignores the Social Security trust fund, and insists that Social Security's deficit, which is miniscule compared to the size of the budget deficit, requires that we cut Social Security benefits.
Next time people start crowing about Social Security's "deficit date", show them this graph and ask them which part of it looks like the real problem.
The data uses:
- Historical budget data from the CBO
- Budget projections from the GAO, assuming the tax cuts are made permanent (a fair assumption given that the House just passed the estate tax bill)
- SSA Trustee projections for 2005, intermediate projections