Entitlements must be removed from federal budget

MOSES LAKE - Do you like what our government has done to Social Security? 

No? Then why leave it in the government's hands where it will only continue to get worse? We must retake personal responsibility for our retirement and health care. To leave these programs as is not only relegates our children to the same mismanagement we've suffered, but it will also bankrupt our country and lead to complete Socialism. Our posterity will pay for the misdeeds of our generations! It is they who will inherit our debt. It is up to us to stop this - not our posterity who are now children or are not even born yet.

Now for those of you saying "Leave our Social Security alone! What about that foreign aid, waste in government?" Well, absolutely those things need to be cut. To say this to me or any Tea-Partier would be singing to the choir. We have demanded this for two years now. Those things do need to be cut. However, it appears that many don't realize how little those items' administrative costs amount to relative to the whole budget picture and what really needs to be cut to get our financial house in order. All those items together, including a little defense cutting, may cut 10 percent of the current budget. That leaves 30 percent more to cut just to balance the budget. 

Representative Doc Hastings showed a budget pie chart at his most recent town-hall meeting. I added the approximate dollar figures and the part which shows the necessary cut to balance the budget. Though he didn't come out and say so quite this directly, I believe Doc hoped that people would start to get the picture I have painted above. That 60 percent is the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

It is very important to note that no current or future budget proposal is going to take away Medicare or Social Security benefits for those already receiving them or soon to receive them. The Paul Ryan proposal attempts to deal with Medicare but states that it will: "Save Medicare for current and future generations while making no changes for those in and near retirement." The proposal only attempts to put in place some tools for beginning to restructure the Social Security system in the future. The liberals will claim that any conservatives' proposal does cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for current retirees. They will also make other claims such as: 'Paul Ryan's budget cuts will kill millions of senior citizens.' They are lying! They do this in order to manipulate the elderly into supporting the liberal agenda. They simply want to expand the peoples' dependence on them. Conservatives, who care about future generations, must and will, come up with responsible budget plans to eventually eliminate retirement and medical care programs from government control. We must support them. The fact is, the Ryan proposal doesn't go nearly far enough, but it is a start. Real budgetary reform won't happen until the Democrats are kicked out of the White House and out of the majority in the Senate. None of these necessary reforms will include cutting Social Security or Medicare benefits for those currently on, or soon to be on, these programs!

Social Security is now a general budget item, with current tax dollars paying for current Social Security checks. Funding Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare and other entitlements is now 60 percent of the federal budget. These programs now cost more each day than the entire revenue being brought in to the federal government each day. That's right: even if we had no government administrative costs and no national defense, we would have to borrow money just to pay for entitlements. And these programs are only growing.

So what do we do?

1. First, what we don't do is leave these programs in the hands of the government. They can't be trusted!

2. We do take back control of, and personal responsibility for, our own retirement and health care. 

3. We do support plans that start to wean America off of entitlements in a responsible, controlled way.

I believe that the only way to really kill that 800 pound gorilla is to remove retirement and health care from the federal government's budget and control. We, in America, have only two choices right now: Either we get control of this or we destroy America. There is no other option.