'Wake-up tour' offers vital message

Coalition pushes entitlement reform

Published November 29, 2006 at midnight

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This may sound oh-so-familiar: The number of Americans of retirement age will double over the next 25 years, making up 20 percent of the population by 2032. Over that time, the ratio of workers paying into Social Security and Medicare will fall by roughly one-third.

If the growth of retirement and health-care entitlements continues unchecked, within four decades spending on these programs would rise to 30 percent of national income, consuming more of the economy than we spend on the entire federal budget today. And since the public will not allow taxes to grow at the same pace as entitlement spending, deficits and public debt will soar.

The forecasts are staggering, if not exactly new. What may be different is a willingness by policy experts across the ideological landscape to publicly join forces and call for action sooner rather than later. That's what happened Tuesday in Denver, when the deficit-fighting Concord Coalition brought its national "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour" to town.

Over the next two years, the group's goal is to meet with local community groups and members of the media. It seeks to educate the public on the need to transform entitlements now, with the hope that pressure from the grass-roots might help skittish elected officials generate the backbone needed to sensibly tackle these out-of-control programs.

Unless entitlement programs are fundamentally reformed - not merely tweaked - in the near future, the United States will more closely resemble Western Europe. Slower economic growth. Higher unemployment. Far less dynamic entrepreneurship and enterprise. Fewer Americans able to afford homes, new cars or higher education for their children.

On the tour are policy experts from left (Diane Lim Rogers of the Brookings Institution), right (Alison Fraser of the Heritage Foundation) and center ( U.S. Comptroller General David Walker).

All agree that tax-funded retirement and medical programs must be overhauled - and especially the 800-pound gorilla, Medicare. Making the necessary changes will require politically difficult decisions, such as gradual boosts in the retirement age; slimmer annual cost-of-living increases; cuts in the range of medical coverage that will be guaranteed by taxpayers for all elderly Americans.

Hence the tour's sense of urgency. Reforming Medicare and Social Security soon would allow current retirees to keep their benefits. Today's working Americans need not be blindsided by changes in the entitlement system. Backbreaking tax increases could be avoided.

If enough Americans understood this, they might demand that candidates running for president and Congress in 2008 make fiscal sanity a priority.

Heritage's Fraser pointed out that the first baby boomers will reach retirement age during the next session of Congress . . . before President Bush leaves office. While the messengers from the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour are no longer in town, their message deserves to resonate across America, so the public can demand responsible action. And quickly, please.

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