To the Editor:
Babies born in the U.S.A. today will owe $333,333 in taxes, $21,667 of it immediately. By their first birthday it will be more.
We have a deficit most Americans are aware of. Newspaper accounts refer to it daily as the spending deficit and our elected officials in Washington D.C. argue daily about raising the debt limit above the present 14 trillion dollars.
There is another, larger deficit. A report by the National Center for Policy Analysis shows that the future value of the unfunded obligations of Social Security and Medicare exceed 100 trillion dollars when the numbers are adjusted to today's dollars. Divide those 100 trillion dollars by the approximately 300 million Americans who are documented citizens and you will find we each owe at least $333,333 to get us caught up. And the bill keeps growing every year.
You can read the NCPA report on line at: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba662
The Social Security Administration's annual Board of Trustees Report for 2011 indicates the open group unfunded obligation for OASDI over the 75-year period ( years 2010 to 2085 ) is $6.5 trillion in present value and is $1.1 trillion more than the measured level of a year ago. If you divide those 6.5 trillion dollars by the 300 million Americans, we each owe $21,667 TODAY, to prevent us from getting further behind. And that is just Social Security. Remember Medicare is underfunded too.
You can read the annual Board of Trustees report on line at: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/TR/2011/tr2011.pdf
The government will need many of those dollars within the next 10 to 20 years.
I don't have my entire portion but if they had been taking it out of our paychecks all along I wouldn't even have what I have.
We all know Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are not going to be enough to get by on.
So what next?
We have many nice people who live in the United States. We have a million millionaires and quite a few billionaires but even if we set the tax rate at 100% and take all their money it is only a couple trillion dollars. And what about next year? We can only take all of it once.
Tax increases can never truly solve all of our financial problems.
We have lost a lot of jobs in our country but if we replaced every job lost to outsourcing and foreign manufacturers it could create 10 to 15 million new jobs in our country. The new tax revenue would be approximately 100 billion dollars, depending on wages and the tax brackets.
Creating new jobs and protectionist economic policies will never truly solve all of our financial problems.
If we chose to enact both ideas it would not be enough to solve all of our problems.
The only course of action which has any hope of solving our financial problems is cutting the spending.
We cannot be submissive to complaints about who will be harmed because we are facing a fierce battle and we know there will be casualties.
We must enter the battle bravely and if our soldiers do not take this hill we will lose the war.
Brad Sewell
Collinsville
Cut federal spending
ORGANIZATIONS IN THIS STORY