The AARP polled 1026 members regarding how to fix the problem. Here the results:
| 69% | Keep the estate tax on estates over $2M |
| 61% | Raise income taxes for households earning over $100K |
| 41% | Cut defense spending |
| 38% | Create a national sales tax |
| 30% | Cut farm subsidies |
| 25% | Raise the Social Security tax |
| 11% | Cut Medicare and Medicaid |
| 7% | Cut Social Security benefits |
Editor of AARP Bulletin member@aarp.org Sun Mar 05 21:05:12 2006 Topic: Elaine Povich's "Red Ink Rising" Thanks for raising this key topic! Polling the members about a solution without analysing the unpleasant causes of the nation's deficit and reporting about the poll's results is however quite misleading. Cause 1: A broken healthcare system. It is now 16% of GDP while other countries have a healthier population which costs them 7-10% of GDP. It took decades to produce this monster in the US. It is the result of the public sector (federal government) creating an entitlement (Medicare) without cost controls and without guidelines. HMO's were created to contain the spiraling costs from the service providers. Now the HMO's are the problem: 30% of the $1.9T is administrative baloney. Hence the choice in your poll should not be cutting Medicare/Medicaid, but cutting the WASTE/ inefficiencies/ administrative overhead in these programs. But, it will take many years to eradicate this cancer. Cause 2: You point out that the government spends $22K per household and receives only $19K on average. It pays to look closer at the numbers. - Inspite of 100 years of progressive taxes, the bottom 50% owns less than 6% of the nation's assets - The bottom 50% does not pay federal income tax - The bottom 95% pays only 50% of federal income tax Thus the US has a huge parasitical (from a socio/economic perspective) underclass. Combining the data in the Bell Curve book and the theory in Steven Pinker's Blank Slate one can explain this disfunctional underclass as the result of gradual shifting of the IQ bell curve to the left due to disproportional procreation in the bottom half of the society. Free public education has paradoxically ADDED to the IQ discrepancy between the top and the bottom, because hidden talents are filtered out and are pushed up wards. Thus the journalist mantra "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer" must be replaced by: the top is getting smarter and the bottom is getting dumber. (This explains why we have a slowly increasing incarceration ratio - with the associated burden on the country's economy.) Hence the fix for this situation is painful, controversial and will also take a long time: creating penalties for over use of entitlements by the lower echalons of the society. (Please note that the overpopulation in the world - including the US - is causing irreversable damage to the planet since 1980, which entails that we need drastic steps anyway.) Please look now again at your poll topics. Grossly misleading, right? Sincerely,