I am responding to the Gazette editorial [“Expansion of Health Care in Virginia,” April 20] expressing hope that Virginia will create another entitlement; this one for the indigent unable to obtain health care. Her sentiment is indisputably heart-felt, but precarious is her source of funding for this benefit: the hideously indebted Federal government.
There is a-coming a serious Federal fiscal crisis. It’s due to our Federal government’s inability to live within its means requiring massive borrowing from foreign governments, predominantly China. To this enormous and growing debt, add its money printing, which reduces the value of the dollar.
If nothing changes, then at some point, likely sooner rather than later, serious cuts to Federal spending will occur if only because of increasing costs to repay what the Federal government has borrowed to give us the benefits we demand.
Without any spending reductions, projections are the Federal government by 2024 will have only enough money to fund entitlements (e. g., Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and to pay the foreigners to whom we are indebted, and nothing else including the Constitutional mandate to defend the nation.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with demanding more benefits from our government, whether Federal, state or local. But dipping into the Federal trough to fund these new benefits merely adds to our national debt burden.
The solution is for advocates of more Federal spending also to identify the means by which more wealth can be created. More wealth produces more revenue to tax and, therefore, more money for governments at all levels to spend. Better to be a wealth-maker first before becoming a wealth-taker.
Jimm Roberts
Alexandria