Table of Contents/Entitlement Report/Introduction/Foreward/I/II/III/IV/V/VI
The charts in this book tell a fascinating, and what could perhaps ultimately be a most tragic story. The final chapter in this story has yet to be fully written, but we cannot avoid writing it in the years soon to come, whether by our action or our inaction. Policy making in Washington suffers from an excess of numbers, graphs, charts, and econometric models. This "techno-speak" is not the language used by most Americans, for the very good and basic reason that the essential components of truth are easily lost whenever a flurry of numerical jargon can be manipulated behind the facade of scientific objectivity. I myself therefore choose to communicate and try to receive most information in plain English prose -- a necessary defense the incessant babble and this onslaught of extraneous data.
The matters so carefully described in this book represent an exception to the general rule cited above. I have found that, whenever the subject is federal entitlement spending and its relationship to the past, present, and future federal deficit, there is no way to adequately describe "reality" without recourse to the type of vivid, graphic portrayal that is contained in this text. You must force citizens to look at graphic portrayals such as these in order for them to come to grips with what is really going on.
The stark reality of our current fiscal situation only emerges after sifting through several of the charts in this book. Taken in isolation, the truth or relevance of any particular chart might possibly be open to challenge. One can always find some hardy soul to assert that Social Security does not have a long-term solvency problem, or some worthy to claim that there is no unfair transfer of income from one generation to another, or some unbridled enthusiast to proclaim that tomorrow's generations still stand to be better off than today's.
Only when one thumbs through all of the pages, in series, does a transcendent truth emerge which is greater than the point being made in any particular chart. Charts 1-2 and 1-4 show for example how entitlement spending has grown far faster than our economy, to dominate the federal budget.
