Mark Steyn’s latest “Happy Warrior” column for National Review tackles the nation’s entitlements crisis:
It’s certainly true that, if a company were to attempt to keep the bulk of its liabilities off the books the way the United States government does, some showboating jackass prosecutor would have its key execs behind bars in nothing flat, and they’d be legislating another round of Sarbanes-Oxley in Washington. Against that argument is the reassurance that that $75-100 trillion isn’t a “liability” in the sense that your car lease of mortgage is. “Entitlement commitments are not debts,” wrote John Hinderaker of the blog Powerline. “Congress can wipe them out simply by repealing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”
That’s technically true in the same sense that it’s technically true Congress can wipe out a lot of our debts — or at any rate our debtors — by nuking Beijing. But is either likely to happen under any scenario this side of total societal meltdown? Indeed, I find it easier to imagine economic collapse, secession, civil war, Mad Max on I-95, cannibal gangs of the undocumented preying on gated communities of upscale gays, etc., than any combination of House, Senate, and president “repealing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.” …
… Whether or not government “entitlements” are debts, they very quickly become a psychological disorder — and a “sense of entitlement” is harder to dislodge than almost anything else.
