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Thank you, Albuquerque Journal, for publishing the relative positions of U.S. Senate candidates Heather Wilson and Martin Heinrich. It is important for all voters to understand their positions as they contemplate whom to vote for. I would like to offer a quick critique of the article in Sunday’s paper.
First of all, it is important to understand that our true national debt is not $16 trillion, as officially reported by the Congressional Budget Office and picked up by the media. The number is actually about $90 trillion, when you include the future benefits of Social Security, Medicare and federal pension payments. This much larger number is not the official number only because Congress has excused itself from having to report these future benefits as liabilities on the government’s balance sheet.
This is a shame, since generally accepted accounting principles require these liabilities to be reported, just as every public corporation must do. The fact is that Congress has been spending payroll tax surpluses on current defense and entitlement programs, with the result that we have no marketable reserves to pay current benefits. We are reduced to having to borrow the money and add to our national debt.
We cannot continue this any longer. We must restructure Social Security, Medicare and federal pensions for those far away from retirement and eliminate the cap on Social Security wages.
Yet, Heinrich claims that our current financial difficulties were only caused by decisions made in the prior administration. He is wrong and needs to study demographics that reflect that our population is aging rapidly, with the number of workers to retirees having dropped from 16:1 in 1950 to less than 3:1 today. This is the primary driver of our annual deficits and our suffocating national debt.
Wilson asserts that Social Security must always be a defined benefit program, but that is also incorrect. Just like almost every corporation and many cities and states, we need to move to defined contribution programs so that our young workers take more responsibility for their retirement security, and not depend on the government, which has not been such a good steward after all.
