If you’re a Republican, you’ve had a lot of numbers to feel good about over the past few months.
Electoral votes: 312 of them. Votes for Donald Trump: 77 million. Popular vote: 49.8 percent to Kamala Harris’ 48.3 percent. Years in the White House: four more.
Those are some big, important numbers.
Here’s a bigger one: $36.1 trillion. That’s the national debt. And unfortunately, Republicans and Democrats refuse to take the time for some hard reflection on the biggest contributor to our national debt: entitlements.
Entitlements, particularly Social Security, mark the third rail of American politics, and even Trump won’t go near it, promising during the campaign that “we’re not touching” those benefits.
Who will, then? Because someone will have to.
We’ve known for years that the budget meteor is hurtling toward Planet Beltway, yet we refuse to do anything but point up at the sky and say, “Yep — there it is, all right! Boy, that thing’s huge. Hope I’m gone before it hits.”
In his 1996 State the Union, now-former President Bill Clinton said that “the era of big government is over.” He was right, actually.
He and his predecessors ushered in the era of humongous, gargantuan, Brobdingnagian, all-encompassing, ultra-profligate, extra-planetary, elephantine, supersized-with-an-eight-gallon-drum-of-Coke-and-a-pallet-of-fries government. His words rang true, but not quite in the way we had hoped.
Entitlements, how should we loathe thee? Let me count the ways — literally.
Let’s start with the biggie, Social Security. A total of $1.5 trillion annually goes out to pay for that, a number which will only grow.
And, of course, I can see you typing the email to me now: “I paid into Social Security! I earned it!” Save yourself the keystrokes, because you did no such thing: You paid for someone else’s Social Security check, based on the guarantee that someone else would do it for you in the future.
Thanks to fewer children being born and adults living longer — as well as a steadfast refusal to consider means-testing or alternative retirement solutions — Social Security is set to run out of cash reserves by 2033 unless legislators fix it before or (more likely) when a crisis occurs.
Next up: Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Affordable Care Act, checking in at $1.7 trillion. Spending on these programs is supercharged by skyrocketing medical costs, which in turn are driven higher by a lack of transparent pricing and the “fee-for-service” model incentivizing health care providers to order needless tests and procedures.
In the case of Medicare, we see the same problem as Social Security: an aging population, combined with fewer young Americans entering the workforce thanks to declining birth rates. Medicaid, meanwhile, is a federal-state partnership, but one where the federal government dictates the terms despite wildly disparate needs across 50 states.
Let’s not forget some other key offenders. There’s the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which clocks in at north of $110 billion, housing assistance at $67 billion, Pell Grants at $39 billion, Head Start at $11 billion, and an innumerable constellation of other entitlement programs sending that debt clock ever higher.
This isn’t even counting COVID-era cash infusions or attempted entitlement programs — like student loan forgiveness, a blatant, desperate giveaway for a party losing youth votes like nothing else which tried to get responsible Americans who paid off their debt or didn’t take it on in the first place to subsidize the education of those who took the loans and hadn’t paid them off yet.
Now, in all of this, there is an opportunity — in fact, a once-in-a-generation opportunity hidden in the numbers I cited right off the bat.
The Catch-22 of the entitlement game is this: Republican voters care more about the debt, but usually tend older, while Democratic voters pretend it doesn’t exist, but generally skew younger.
In other words, the ones most attuned to our budgetary woes are also the ones who stand to benefit from ignoring it just a little longer. (It’s perhaps not accidental that a Republican, Herbert Hoover, coined the ageless political epigram, “Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.”)
For reasons both economic and cultural, however, there’s a perceptible shift afoot. Since 2008, as NPR noted, the Democratic presidential candidate has gotten at least 60 percent of voters under 30. In 2024, exit polls showed Kamala Harris getting just 54 percent of the youth vote. Moreover, where it counted — the swing states, where a luxury virtue-signal vote wasn’t an option — the numbers were even more dire.
In Michigan, the two were even at 49 percent. North Carolina had Harris at 51 percent, Trump 48. Wisconsin: Harris 53, Trump 45. Pennsylvania: Harris 53, Trump 44.
What’s more, pollster John Della Volpe, who specializes in youth politics, said the bedrock issue wasn’t wokeness or Gaza, but the bank accounts of the young.
“From the earliest focus groups I conducted this year, there was this innate sense that younger people’s personal finances were better and would be better under a Trump administration,” said Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.
“Nothing the Democrats seemed to do, over the course of the last year, really changed that perspective.”
And while older voters tended to be more reliably Harris, that didn’t negate the shift among younger voters.
Which brings us to the opportunity: Republicans aren’t going to lose their base by talking about ballooning entitlements that will go bust sometime in the not-too-distant future. They’ll shore it up.
This isn’t Social Security shock therapy, or making grandma survive on a bowl of rice a day, no matter what fact-free piffle Mazie Hirono hyperventilates about on the Senate floor.
It’s putting forward common-sense reforms that bring costs under control in a fair and sustainable way, creating a transparent, means-tested way of caring for our elderly without bankrupting our youth.
Yes, we’ll hear the usual hue and cry from the Democrats, and even from the predictable Republicans. However, never before in my lifetime of observing American politics have I seen a young electorate so ready to hear and heed the immortal words the economist Thomas Sowell penned years ago:
To hear some politicians tell it, we are all entitled to all sorts of things, ranging from “affordable housing” to “a living wage.” But the reality is that the human race is not entitled to anything, not even the food we need to stay alive. If we don’t produce food, we are just going to starve. If we don’t build housing, then we are not going to have housing, “affordable” or otherwise.
Particular individuals or groups can be given many things, to which politicians say they are “entitled,” only if other people are forced by the government to provide those things to people who don’t need to lift a finger to earn them. All the fancy talk about “entitlement” means simply forcing some people to work to produce things for other people, who have no obligation to work.
For years, this is what the young voted for, all assuming the meteor was far enough away from Planet Beltway. They’re either no longer that dumb, no longer have that luxury, or (let’s pray) both. Thus, now isn’t the moment for Trump to go squishy on this.
If there was ever a time for some hard reflection over what our political class has decided voters are “entitled” to in order to buy their support, all while mortgaging the future again and again at higher and higher interest rates, now is it. Let us not squander it.
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