How about a freeze on entitlement programs?

As anybody who has spent some time on Capitol Hill understands, discretionary
spending is an ever-declining portion of the overall budget. Most of the budget
is allocated for entitlement spending, with a growing percentage of the budget
going to pay for the interest on the debt.

Discretionary spending is kind of like spending for the health club, cable, the
home alarm system, clothes and restaurants in a family’s budget. Mandatory spending
is the money that goes to pay for rent (or the mortgage), the utility bills,
health insurance and taxes. Interest on the debt is, well, like interest on the
credit cards.

The biggest entitlement expenditures come with Medicare and Social Security. For
all of you old people out there, I know you think that Social Security is a
sacred trust, and that you paid in all of your lives and you damn well better
get your money back. I know, I have heard it before, from my own family.

But the fact of the matter is that most people get a lot more money out of
Social Security than they ever put in. The folks who are going to get screwed
are the younger Americans who are paying in now and having little chance in
seeing us solvent enough in the future to make up the difference.

But for older set, that is not their concern. Their concern is to get their
money back and then some, because they were told that Social Security was a
sacred trust, and the long-term financial health of this country is something
to worry about far into the future, and not now.

David Brooks had a fascinating column today in The New York Times about old people. His point is that getting older
ain’t so bad, and that you can teach old dogs new tricks. As he put it:

Older people retain their ability to remember emotionally nuanced
events. They are able to integrate memories from their left and right
hemispheres. Their brains reorganize to help compensate for the effects of
aging. A series of longitudinal studies, begun decades ago, are producing a
rosier portrait of life after retirement. These studies don’t portray old age
as surrender or even serenity. They portray it as a period of development — and
they’re not even talking about über-oldsters jumping out of airplanes. People
are most unhappy in middle age and report being happier as they get older. This
could be because as people age they pay less attention to negative emotional
stimuli …

Of course, that happiness could also be because older people don’t work as hard
or as much, because they get their Social Security checks on time and they get
most of their medical care paid for by the government.

But, as I have said in the past, we can’t afford to have people retire at age
62 if they are going to live until they are 92. It is bad for our fiscal
health, it is bad for the mental health of retirees and it is bad for this
country if we are not tapping into the talents and the experience of our oldest
citizens.

When I wrote about this in a CNN.com column last year, I had several people e-mail
me that they wanted to work, but once they got close to 60, companies made them
take early retirement and then they couldn’t find another job.

Well, if that is the case, and I strongly suspect that it is, we must change
the laws to make firing on the basis of age more difficult. We also must find
ways to get older Americans back in the workforce doing the things they love to
do.

I doubt it is feasible to actually freeze entitlement spending for three years,
but we should find out if it is. My friend Billy Pitts always talks about
finding greater efficiencies in entitlement spending by establishing error
rates and then ratcheting down on them on a yearly basis. Sounds good to me.

But I bet that if you said to the country, “OK, folks, we are going freeze
spending on the entire budget for one year,” there wouldn’t be revolution in
the streets. There would be some real discomfort, sure. But such an action
would inspire agencies at all levels to find some true efficiencies, especially
with Social Security and Medicare, which is where our biggest long-term
financial problems can be found.

And one of the ways we have to come to grips with our long-term fiscal picture
is to change the way we look at old age in this country. People shouldn’t be
expected to do nothing from the ages of 65 to 85. They do better, and we will
do better as a society, if they have something to do in the golden years.

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