The current drag on the deficit is significant, Boccia said. The 2014 cash-flow deficit was $39 billion. Over the next 10 years, the OASI program’s cumulative cash-flow deficit will amount to $840 billion, according to the trustees’ intermediate assumptions.
“For as long as the federal government is running deficits in excess of Social Security’s cash-flow deficits, we can assume that this $840 billion shortfall will be matched dollar for dollar by an increase in the public debt,” said Boccia, who maintains that reforms are dire.
While whipping votes for a GOP tax bill on Thursday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) attacked “liberal programs” for the poor and said Congress needed to stop wasting Americans' money, the Washington Post reported.
“We're spending ourselves into bankruptcy,” Hatch said. “Now, let's just be honest about it: We're in trouble. This country is in deep debt. You don't help the poor by not solving the problems of debt, and you don't help the poor by continually pushing more and more liberal programs through.”
Congress will be required to pass reconciliation legislation in 2018 or automatic cuts impacting Medicare will kick in.
Critics of entitlement program cuts are girding for battle. In a letter blasted out to lawmakers last week, AARP CEO Jo Ann C. Jenkins said that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has confirmed that unless Congress takes action, reconciliation legislation will result in automatic federal funding cuts of $136 billion in fiscal year 2018, $25 billion of which must come from Medicare.
“Such sweeping cuts would be detrimental to an already vulnerable population,” Jenkins said. “The Senate tax bill could trigger tens of billions of dollars in potential cuts to Medicare next year alone. The large increase in the deficit will inevitably lead to calls for greater spending cuts, which are likely to include dramatic cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other important programs serving older Americans.”
Trump has not specified which programs would be affected by proposed “entitlement reform,” but Democrats say “entitlement” is code for cuts to “Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been waging a Twitter war against the president all week, including putting the President’s tweets onto poster boards Sanders displayed on the house floor. Among them, this Trump promise contained in a tweet on March 10, 2016:
“It is my absolute intention to leave Social Security the way it is. Not increase the age and leave Social Security as it is.”
President Trump should either take cuts to entitlement programs off the table or admit to his voters that he lied, Sanders said on the Senate floor on Tuesday.