Big government gripes mean entitlement cuts

So many people complain about big government, but the only way to do that is to cut entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, according to Tom Sho...

By Jory Heckman
Federal News Radio

Public perception of Washington and government at-large seems to have hit an all-time low, but what are we really talking about when people gripe about “big government?”

Tom Shoop, editor-in-chief at Government Executive, said in an interview with Federal News the public gets too distracted bad-mouthing the government to look at the numbers.

“People don’t stop and do the math on what ‘big government’ is, really, and what they mean by it,” Shoop said. “One way to look at it is to think of Social Security, Medicare, and everything else. And if you do that, if you go back to 1960, there was no Medicare, social security was roughly paying for itself, and everything else consumed about 14.2 percent of GDP.”

Contemporary figures have not changed much, Shoop said.

“If you fast-forward to last year, deep in the era of big government, spending on everything else was 14.7 percent of GDP, roughly the same, and in fact, at a time when were pumping huge amounts of money into the economy. The projections – even the dire projections – are that spending on everything else, that is people, I think, tend to think of as big government, will continue to decline until it’s about 13 percent.”

Shoop said if people are honest about shrinking the size of government, they should focus on entitlement programs.

“This is the stuff that everyone talks about for cuts – we’ve got to cut wasteful spending, we’ve got to cut this agency, that agency – and it’s really not a helpful debate, because it’s not where the real spending is,” he said. “Where the real spending is, is in areas like Social Security and Medicare, and those are areas where we have to decide how much are we willing to pay for.”

Cutting elsewhere is simply nit-picking over small savings when the costs are enormous, he said.

“Very few people are grasping seriously with the issues of how much can be cut, and where can be cut, and what the reality of the situation is. I think most people just want to complain,” he said.

“If you have a problem in your household, where your income doesn’t meet your expenses, and you can’t make your mortgage payment, and your response is to say, ‘I’m going to quit going to Starbucks once a week,’ it’s not going to take long before you start to realize that’s not going to really address the problem.”

Shoop said the public shouldn’t hang all the blame on Congress, since they are elected officials.

“I’ve seen a real intense anger this week at Washington, and that Washington is doing this, but these people, we all sent them there. If you don’t like what they’re doing, if you want another approach, then you should vote for other people, because they’re not doing this on their own. They’re following the will of the people. This isn’t another entity here, this is us.”

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Jory Heckman is an intern with Federal News Radio.

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