Before we get to today’s insanity, please consider the following proposition: as many of you know, the withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a historic and fatal endeavor. But the failure did not start just in the past few weeks, it has been a twenty year disaster. It has cost American taxpayers about a trillion dollars, has left thousands of our brave armed forces folks dead, maimed, or wounded and has resulted in an unknown but substantial number of civilian deaths.
Afghanistan has been a collective failure of multiple Presidential administrations and multiple sessions of Congress. Thus, please consider signing the petition below that calls for the immediate resignation of every member of Congress that has at least twenty years of service and the resignation of President Biden, Vice President Harris, and critical, and failed, members of the Biden Administration. They do not deserve to serve any longer given their miserable twenty year track record of death, destruction and waste in Afghanistan.
Also, if you are passionate about this topic and effort, feel free to pass the link along to others who might also feel the same way, i.e. incompetence should not be rewarded:
https://www.change.org/p/american-citizens-demand-immediate-congressional-resignations-for-the-twenty-year-afghanistan-debacle
Biden and others need to resign for dereliction of duty, incompetence and total lack of empathy. Nothing short of resignation is acceptable. Thank you.
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As we have often said, American politicians today rarely have the brain power, courage, or creativity to resolve the very big issues facing all Americans today. As a result of their ineptness, they end up working on stupid stuff that has a very limited, if any, value for many Americans.
Despite inflation, Afghanistan and the crisis on the southern border, Joe Biden recently took time out to have a photo op with the WNBA champions. In a previous post we reported how California politicians were working on how to replace a statue rather than fixing the major problems in the state. You get the idea, working on stuff that nobody cares about because they cannot fix what is really broken and important.
And probably nothing is more important to tens of millions of Americans than the future of the Medicare system. This is a critical component of retired Americans’ being and lifestyle so, naturally, it is important to so many people, more important than an WNBA photo op or a California statue.
How badly has the political class managed the Medicare system? Consider an analysis from the Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget based on the latest annual assessment of the system by the Social Security Trustees (note: go to the following link to see our analogous post for the failing Social Security system: https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-impending-collapse-of-social.html):
The analysis found that Medicare’s Part A hospital fund will go bankrupt in 2026.
This is the shortest distance to insolvency since the 1997 estimate.
The Part A funding will run $578 billion short over the next ten years.
To avoid insolvency the payroll tax for Medicare would have to increase 27% or benefits would have to be cut 16%.
Total Medicare spending will increase from 4% of GDP now to over 6% by 2040, much higher than economic growth is likely to be, which means Medicare tax revenue from economic growth will not keep up with increased Medicare spending.
The current funding for Part A is paid partially by general tax funds since current Medicare taxes already do not cover current expenses.
If nothing changes, then the analysis predicts that payments to health providers would have to decrease by at least 9% to bring expenses in line with current revenue.
This 9% would grow to 22% by 2040.
The Trustees project that gross Medicare spending will grow from 4.1 percent of GDP in 2021 to 5.3% in 2031 and then to 6.2% in 2045.
But Part A is not the only Medicare expense going higher and higher since over the next 75 years, they expect Part B to rise from 2.0 to 3.6% of GDP and Part D to rise from 0.5 to 0.9% of GDP.
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