Editor’s note: This oped is by Tom Licata.
Art Woolf’s July 16 “No Reason to Exaggerate” article in Vermont Tiger, took “exaggerated” shots at Governor Douglas.
Art, You owe Governor Douglas an apology.
Gov. Douglas merely misspoke, when, as Art reported, he said this during an interview on Vermont Public Radio, hosted by John Dillon:
“The United States of America spends every single dime that comes into the Treasury on only three things: Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Everything else is borrowed money.”
Considering that Art is a trained economist, his metaphor of tying Gov. Douglas to that of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” in his July 16 post is both sad and disturbing. Gov. Douglas was not “exaggerating the current problem,” as Art wrote.
And, it is Art, who GROSSLY under-exaggerates the current problem, when he states: “the real fiscal problem is in the near term future-the next 10 or 20 years-not today.”
We’ll be lucky if the (forward-looking) financial markets give us another 12 – 36 months to demonstrate a credible plan to deal with – in the words of Mr. Bowles – our “cancer.”
I was watching CSPAN recently, when former White House chief of staff and co-chair of President Obama’s “Fiscal Commission,” Erskine Bowles, said this, at the National Governors Association Meeting:
“As a nation, we face the most predictable economic crisis in our history…this debt is like a cancer…it is truly going to destroy the country from within…
“Today, if you just look at the MANDATORY SPENDING, which is principle (sic) Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; it does consume 100% of the federal revenues. That does mean that every dollar we spend on homeland security, the military, defense, education, infrastructure, transportation; all borrowed, and one-half borrowed from foreign countries…”
End quote.
Here’s the link to Sunday’s National Governors Association Meeting. Begin at minute 21 to hear Mr. Bowles repeat this quote:
Should you take Art’s $1.354 trillion figure from his July 16 article and add $187 billion of mandatory interest payments and another $607 million of “Other” mandatory spending, one arrives at the total federal revenue figure of roughly $2.1 trillion.
The link to these numbers, from OMB, can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY_2007.png
“Nobody believes a liar…even when he is telling the truth,” so goes the last line in Art’s “Boy Who Cried Wolf” metaphor.
For three years now, I’ve been crying “Wolf,” and should I be intimated to be a “liar,” I would wear this badge with honor.
For, it is the moniker of those in Montpelier – and in our nation’s capital – that I would most avoid – – – and that label would read “Sheep.”
