Rim Country Gazette: Ryan: No way to avoid trillion-dollar deficits because of all the old people

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Ryan: No way to avoid trillion-dollar deficits because of all the old people

Speaker Paul Ryan wants you to know that it is not his fault at all that we're going to have a trillion-dollar deficit. It's the fault of old people. Because of course it is. It's Paul Ryan.

"That was going to happen. The baby boomers retiring was going to do that," Ryan said on NBC's "Meet the Press" of projections that the country will start running trillion-dollar deficits as soon as 2020. […]

"These deficit trillion-dollar projections have been out there for a long, long time. Why? Because of mandatory spending which we call entitlements," he said when pressed by NBC host Chuck Todd on Corker's criticism.

Ryan, a former House Budget Committee chairman, said the Congressional Budget Office projects discretionary spending to increase by only $300 billion over the next decade and for total tax revenues to continue to increase.

"Mandatory spending which is entitlements, that goes to $2 trillion over the next decade. Why does it go to $2 trillion? Because the boomer generation is retiring," Ryan said.

Those pesky retirees, expecting to get all that money they spent into the Social Security and Medicare system back when they need it. They're going to break us! And there's nothing to be done about it. Nope, no way you can do anything to raise any money to counter all those people getting older.

Never mind giving the banksters and the corporations and the 1 percent $2 trillion in tax cuts. It's as if taxes have nothing at all to do with the government's revenues.