On the recordFebruary 10, 2011
Let's take a look at this problem because you've got all these entitlements. And this represents all the money that comes in in a year. Then things here are beyond. And yet we're thinking that you've got to do defense and you've got to have the park open or you've got to have a prison open. So how are you going to deal with this problem? Let's take a look at the next chart. This is an optimistic way of saying it. This is Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and it shows over time--this is 1965--and over time, these things are getting bigger because some of us baby boomers are coming along and putting more demand on the system. But this is an optimistic chart because the problem with it is you don't have the other entitlements in here or the debt service. So what the problem is, if you put those other things in, what we're saying with this first pie chart is that, as you take a look at our revenue from taxes, it's averaging about 18 percent. So here comes the revenue along at an average of 18 percent, and here we are at 2011, somewhere in here, and you put these other things in and it comes all the way up to here. We can zero defense. We can take every soldier off the field, every ship out at sea, every plane out of here. We can zero defense to zero and all the other discretionary spending and, boom, here we are. Our entitlements have eaten up everything that the government takes.
