The Wall Street Journal:

Want to have some fun this Halloween? Find a government accountant. You probably think there isn’t a more unflappable person anywhere than one of the green-eyeshade boys. OK, now sneak up behind him and whisper “Medicare obligations” into his ear. Aaaagggghh! He’ll go racing in the street, stark-raving mad with fright. Entitlement costs are Uncle Sam’s permanent Halloween.

Government and private accountants who worry about these costs belong to something called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, or Fasab, which sets government accounting standards. The nightmare that keeps these folks awake is that Congresses and Presidents have made entitlement promises for Social Security and Medicare so outsized, so outlandish and so unaffordable that the U.S. is, in theory, heading for the financial abyss. And no one cares!

The head of the hopelessly mistitled Government Accountability Office, David M. Walker, is touring the country giving speeches about the impending fall of the financial sky. “You can’t solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved,” Mr. Walker moans.

Quite right.

One of the greatest disservices this nation’s leaders have done to the American people is the creation and growth of government entitlements.  These programs have become so pervasive in our society that merely suggesting that one should end, or even be cut back, will get you talked about by some people as though you were a person who enjoys doing cruel things to puppies and bunny rabbits.  People in this country have come to feel that we need entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.  That without them this nation’s social fabric would come apart at the seems.

That’s just not so.  The truth about these entitlements, from creation of Social Security right through President Bush’s prescription drug program, is that they have only ever been about politicians buying our votes with our own tax dollars.  Unfortunately, after decades of that sort of nonsense, we’ve grown close to the time when we must “pay the piper” for all these good-will entitlements.  As the baby boomer generation moves into retirement - and the number of non-working retirees becomes greater and the number of working, tax-paying citizens becomes less - our government is going to be reaching a budget crisis. 

We simply cannot afford to continue as we are now.

But do our leaders in Washington D.C. recognize that?  I think they do recognize that, but prefer to pass the buck on this difficult situation.  They’d rather just do whatever keeps them in the good graces of the public now and leave solving the hard problems to those who come after them.

What’s pathetic about all of this is that the solution to the problem is relatively simple.  All we’d need to do to stop this problem before it becomes a crisis is cut back on the government’s social programs and give the tax dollars being used to fund them back to the people.  In terms of required action, this is almost nothing.  Politically though, this is a veritable Mt. Everest as those in the government who enjoy seeing the government redistribute our own wealth back to us will rabidly oppose any attempt to cut back on social programs.  Just mentioning the idea that perhaps citizens should be allowed some control over the money they pay into Social Security is enough to set most of these folks off on wild stories about indigent senior citizens living off of dog food.

But we need to move past that sort of silly rhetoric so that we can recognize a real problem that will be facing us in the near future and deal with it responsibly.