February 12, 2012
Thomas Friedman gives the Republicans some well-deserved bashing in his column today, but he also unthinkingly repeats his standard lines:
“The second of our great long-term challenges are our huge debt and entitlement obligations.”
Of course our debt has expanded substantially due to the economic devastation caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. It is not at a level that poses any great harm to the country as witnessed both by the fact that financial markets are willing to lend the United States money at very low interest rates and also that the United States and other countries have been able to sustain much larger debt burdens for long periods of time.
The part about entitlement obligations is misleading since the real problem is the broken U.S. health care system. We pay more than twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries. This gap is projected to rise rapidly in the decades ahead. If we paid a comparable amount for our health care we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses, not deficits.
It is ironic that Friedman unthinkingly repeats cliches about entitlements when the point of the article is adopting policies to ensure that the United States is among the HIEs (high-imagination-enabling country) rather the LIEs (low-imagination-enabling countries).
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