This piece is still profoundly stupid, but useful — A Senior Fellow at something called the Roosevelt Institute writes:
The three big entitlements have symbolic power as the monuments of the New Deal and the Great Society. (…)
But treating the entitlements as sacred comes at a huge cost in all the other programs. While there’s surely waste in domestic discretionary programs, from agriculture subsidies to the occasional National Science Foundation grant that sounds silly, it also includes education, energy research, transportation—and basically everything that constitutes the investment in economic growth that we need far more than we need budget austerity.
And while it might make some sense to insist on holding Social Security untouchable (…), it’s very strange to take the same approach to Medicare, which is projected to consume 5.5 percent of GDP by 2035, up from 3.6 percent today, without providing better services or serving significantly more people.
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