Why it’s hard for the US to cut or even control Medicare spending

  President Joe Biden’s 2024 proposed budget includes plans to shore up the finances of Medicare, the federal health insurance program that covers Americans who are 65 and up and some younger people with disabilities.

  His administration aims to increase from 3.8% to 5% an existing Medicare tax that’s collected on the labor and investment earnings of Americans who make more than US$400,000 annually. It also aims to reap some savings from having the government negotiate prices on more prescription drugs.

Getting poorer while working harder: The ‘cliff effect’

  Forty percent of all working-age Americans sometimes struggle to pay their monthly bills.

  There is no place in the country where a family supported by one minimum-wage worker with a full-time job can live and afford a 2-bedroom apartment at the average fair-market rent.

  Given the pressure to earn enough to make ends meet, you would think that low-paid workers would be clamoring for raises. But this is not always the case.

Richard M. Ebeling: The national debt limit equals a balanced budget

  Once again the United States government is rapidly approaching a fiscal debt ceiling: After March 16, 2017, Uncle Sam will not be legally allowed to borrow any more money to cover its budget deficits, unless Congress votes to raise the debt limit, once again, like it has every time in the past.

  Uncle’s Sam’s debt has been growing at a frightening rate over the last several decades. It took almost two hundred years, from around 1790, when the government of the United States was established, to 1980 for the federal government to accumulate $1 trillion of debt through deficit spending.

Katherine Green Robertson: The changing objectives of government assistance

  Under the Obama administration, "reforms" to federal assistance programs have simply increased the programs’ recipients and spending rather than implementing more oversight or accountability. Specifically, the administration has taken proactive steps to recruit Americans into programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and water down eligibility requirements for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF). Work requirements for recipients, previously tied to TANF eligibility since 1996, were rendered optional by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for state enforcement in 2012.

Katherine Green Robertson: Turning a blind eye to fraud in benefits administration

  Amid the news of the debt ceiling debate and the government shutdown, a disturbing report was released in the U.S. Senate on October 7 revealing rampant abuse in the approval process of Social Security Disability benefits. The report, issued by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, offers a peek into just how loosely at least one government benefits program is administered and sheds light on the need for more oversight of the programs that swallow 10% of the nation’s GDP.