US Federal Entitlement Programs

The US Federal government has systematically created entitlement programs since WWII that continue to grow and guzzle. Today entitlement programs consume about 62% of the total budget. Defense and every other discretionary item, including all the earmarks, make up 38%.

Their is a lot of criticism about the Farm Bill (which President Bush just vetoed, but congress is likely to override) giving "rich farmers" unnecessary subsidies. We can and should talk about this. There's almost no media attention on the food stamps component of the Bill, which is a modest % increase over the current food stamps program, but just this increase completely dwarfs the crop subsidies payments.

The growth of the entitlements is on autopilot right now. The projected costs are staggering, and frankly, unsupportable.

The Urban Institute and the Progressive Policy Institute are introducing stopgap recommendations to would put the key entitlement programs on a fixed budget, rather than automatic increases. Then congress would need to reassess this programs each year, so those programs would need to compete in the political discussion with other national priorities.

U.S. Representative Paul Ryan has introduced legislation to take a more comprehensive look at reining in entitlements and simplifying the tax code. While unlikely to pass in current form, and certainly not in this election period, I applaud the effort to get real dialogue going in Congress.

I've taken criticism about my "insensitivity" to the needs of the poor that these programs are designed to help. Jesus absolutely cares about the poor, and so should we. But I'm concerned that when we create entitlement programs to help people, we create unsustainable monsters which consume so much in taxes and have unintended consequences on our economy, that we need to go back to the basic questions of the purpose of government vs. our individual and church body expectations. We've been running this experiment since the 1940's, and so have many other countries, and I fear the experiment will run us into the ground.