This article was featured on Philly.com and in the Northeast Times.

Does $700 billion sound like a lot of money to you? How about $9 trillion, which is the current sum of America’s national debt?  With the recent collapse of major Wall Street institutions and a $700 billion bailout, it is apparent that America is facing serious financial problems. However, what you may not know is that there is another economic crisis looming in the near future that will affect every Philadelphian, and if we act now we may be able to prevent it.

Philadelphia’s first baby boomers start retiring in 2012. Over the course of their retirement, the next twenty-five to thirty years, spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security is projected to absorb every other discretionary dollar the government spends, which means no more federal funding for city programs and no more mortgage tax breaks for Philadelphians. It is undeniable that the United States will be unable to provide entitlements promised by these programs to all who are eligible if we do not begin to address the problems with the structure of the federal budget and federal spending. It is not easy to recognize how the federal government’s depleted resources will personally affect us, but we can manipulate these intangible numbers to illustrate the financial realities for each Philadelphian in our communities.

You already owe $32,000 to the Federal government – every American does. If you are the average Philadelphian, it would take almost the entirety of your income to pay off your share of the national debt before taxes. Philadelphia’s share of the federal debt is over $48 billion, which is before baby boomers start to retire and congress writes a $700 billion check to attempt to fix Wall Street.

We must transcend the short sightedness that is ingrained in our culture and insist that our government promotes bipartisanship collaboration and cuts spending growth.

Not exactly. But it is important to understand that not everything we write about here is accepted by everyone.  Some things no one can really dispute, such as the fact that our national debt is currently above $10 trillion, the fact that the age you can first start receiving benefits from Social Security is 62, and the fact that Pound-It is a nonpartisan coalition of students at the University of Pennsylvania.  However, some things can’t simply be taken at face value.  In my post “Hello, your child owes the government $175,000,” I quote a few statistics, one of them being that our unfunded liabilities add up to around $99 trillion.  I got that number from Richard Fisher, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.  If I asked David Walker, former head of the Government Accountability Office and now president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, what our current unfunded liabilities are, he’d tell me about $53 trillion. That’s almost 50% less than Fisher’s estimate, though they both agree that this nation is in trouble.  But it’s not just in the numbers.  This entire site is devoted to increasing awareness on the national debt crisis and the threat of entitlements, a threat that some, including James Galbraith, professor of economics at the University of Texas, and Paul Krugman, recent Nobel Prize winner in economics and professer of economics and international affairs at Princeton, don’t believe exists.

And this is the problem with projections and statistics in general: a lot of the time, they’re just opinions masquerading as “facts.”  Different assumptions lead to radically different numbers and it’s easy to manipulate the same set of data to support completely opposite viewpoints.  We at Pound-It will continue to provide information in what we consider to be a responsible manner, but you should always keep in mind that we have an agenda and will inevitably be slightly biased.  We believe certain things, such as the budget crisis, are real and that’s what we’ll keep talking about.  I urge all of you to go out and learn more about this subject yourself.  Look at the criteria the Citizens Against Government Waste sets for calling a project pork.  Read more about the methods used to get these numbers everyone quotes and find out which organizations are making those statistics.  Go out there and find the whole picture because only you can decide for yourself what is “true.”

What would you do with $320 million?  Would you use it to build a bridge to an island with a population of 50?  Well some government officials would.  The “Bridge to Nowhere” has been one of the more infamous pork barrel projects recently, due to the upcoming presidential election, but there are plenty of other projects to bash.  For example, Pennsylvanian Congressman John Murtha appropriated $23 million for a program run by the Department of Justice that the department itself wants to shut down.  And there are 11,609 other projects like that one, costing us taxpayers a total of $17.2 billion.  That’s a 337 percent increase in number of projects and a 30 percent increase in cost from last year.  Sure $17.2 billion may not be much compared to the government’s $438 billion dollar deficit this year, but do we really need to be wasting $17.2 billion?

So what can you do about all this? A lot actually.  Right now, Pennsylvania has the second largest number of earmark projects according to the government’s Office of Management and Budget and is fifth in total pork barrel spending according to the Citizen’s Against Government Waste, a private non-partisan, non-profit organization.  Write to your representatives and ask them why they aren’t doing anything about this waste. Call Senators Arlen Specter and Robert Casey and ask them why they voted against the motion to stop earmarks for the 2009 fiscal year. We can’t create a responsible government out of pork. This is the first step and the easiest step towards fixing our budget crisis.

Senator Casey’s contact information

Senator Specter’s contact information

Citizen’s Against Government Waste

Office of Management and Budget

No, this is not some sort of practical joke.  It’s how much every one of us owes for the future national debt.  Right now, our debt is a little over $10 trillion dollars.  It’s quite the hefty sum, but that’s nothing compared to what’s about to hit us.  As the baby boomer generation is about to reach retirement age, the numbers get exponentially larger. Rapidly rising healthcare costs combined with the smaller workforce will push Medicare, which is already running a deficit, into bankruptcy by 2019.  Social Security is a bit better off but don’t expect your children to enjoy its benefits; it’ll be bankrupt by 2041.  Instead, the next two generations will be paying off a projected $99 trillion in unfunded liabilities.  That’s more than the number of cells people have in their bodies.

So how come no one in the government is doing anything about this even though by 2030, all of our revenue will be used up just by paying for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest?  These figures aren’t secrets; in fact, the Congressional Budget Office itself has admitted that “the federal budget is on an unsustainable path.”  So why do the tax policies proposed by McCain and Obama each increase the national debt significantly over the next ten years?  Is the “maverick” just another negligent cow herder?  Is that really “change” we can believe in?  If you’re interested in learning more, come to the “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour” at the University of Pennsylvania in Houston Hall on October 14th, hosted by the Concord Coalition, or check out some of the links listed below.  This is our future.  Let’s fix it.

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

Facing Up

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Concord Coalition

Office of Management and Budget