10/31/04
IOU
Since most of us don’t pay that much attention to the musical chairs in Washington, you probably didn’t notice when Paul O’Neill got thrown out by Bush as the Secretary of the Treasury, and replaced him with John Snow. It made the tiniest of ripples in the media.
Well, Paul did something really dumb. He asked a couple of his experts to calculate how prepared the country was to pay the bills for commitments that had already been made. The findings were never published…the Bush administration, focused on the next election, made sure of that.
The bill is $44.2 trillion and there’s no clue yet as to how it can be paid. The Social Security bill is $7 trillion. Medicare is $36.6 trillion, and all the other commitments come to only $0.6 trillion. And these debts do not, of course, show in Bush’s 2004 budget.
With the baby boomers starting to retire in five years, there will be fewer workers left to pay the bills.
$44 trillion is four times the U.S. GDP and 1.5 times the whole world’s GDP. By next year it’ll be $46, if no major changes are made. Actually, considering the rate at which Medicare costs have been growing, the 1% growth per year estimate they used was conservative. It’s been more than 1.5%, and that would bring the total bill to more like $65 trillion.Yes, of course I have a solution to the problem. A simple solution. A workable solution.
If my message of how easy it is for people to cure any illness they have with no doctor or medication and never get sick again could be gotten to the public that Medicare bill would drop about 90% and we’d be home free.No, I don’t have any ideas on how to get the message out.Gutting Big Pharma will be as difficult as getting Big Oil out of the administration and Congress.
Every family in the U.S. needs a copy of my Secret Guide to Health. We need to get the fast food vendors out of our schools, get rid of vending machines, and sink the food giants.
With everyone suddenly doubling their life spans, the Social Security costs would rocket. But we’d sure see a huge growth in leisure businesses and travel for seniors.