Little discretion for discretionary spending 🤑 We have gotten ourselves into debt on auto pilot🤑

Not since Harry Truman will a new leader en­ter of­fice with a higher debt-to-GDP ra­tio. And for the first time in decades, the new pres­ident will face the specter of widen­ing deficits de­spite a grow­ing economy…

Those fis­cal constraints, though, are in­creas­ingly pal­pa­ble. Spend­ing on dis­cretionary pro­grams, or those that law­mak­ers fund di­rectly every year, is be­ing crowded out by spend­ing on what are known as en­ti­tle­ment pro­grams, in­clud­ing Medicare and So­cial Se­cu­rity. About two-thirds of all spend­ing—in­clud­ing in­ter­est payments on the na­tional debt—is in that lat­ter cat­e­gory, com­pared with about half in the 1980s. Just one-third of spending is ac­tu­ally set by Con­gress and the White House through an­nual spend­ing bills…

By 2022, nearly every dol­lar of rev­enue the U.S. col­lects will have been com­mit­ted be­fore Congress even takes a vote, ac­cord­ing to an analy­sis by Eu­gene Steuerle of the Ur­ban Institute.  Excerpt: WSJ 9-26-16

There are those among us who still hold debt and deficit spending don’t matter and that Social Security has nothing to do with either. Take special note of in­clud­ing in­ter­est payments. Right now about $98 billion of those interest payments are on the $2.8 trillion of treasury bonds held by the Social Security Trust.

So, when you hear about all the new programs to be provided or the taxes to be cut, you are being played for a fool. You can be sure that there is a politician waiting with pen in hand to draft new spending legislation to offset any possible savings anywhere or any increase in taxes. Instead of savings from abuse and fraud, such as they are, being used to reduce spending, the supposed savings are promised to fund something new even before being achieved.

You are being played for a fool. No, let me restate that, the politicians know you are a fool because Americans will be swayed by their promises and vote out of office a politician telling the truth or doing the right thing for the Country. Whoopee, free iPhones, free college, free health care, expanded Social Security, paid leave and subsidized child care and more tax credits for health care.