General Fund

Brad DeLong gets shrill today. As Ed Kilgore said, the goal of the Republican party (or at least the faction of it in power today) seems to be the "drive to simultaneously wreck the federal government and to perpetuate their control over the wreckage as long as possible through the exercise of the rawest sort of institutional power and corruption." DeLong validates this assumption by noting the serious fiscal problem with the General Fund which is being recklessly ignored amidst all of the talk about "saving" Social Security. First, he displays his point in the following graph:



Against the claim that the Social Security Trust Fund will run into some problems after 2014, DeLong writes:

That is indeed true. But the General Fund's problems get worse too--and get worse at a much faster rate: the Bush tax cuts, Medicare, and Medicaid guarantee that.

So why dink around claiming that the most important fiscal-policy thing to do right now is to "fix Social Security"? When the General Fund has problems five times as big happening five times faster?

Why? Because, as Kilgore says, "today's Republican Party, and its leader, are built on a foundation of fundamental dishonesty."