Kevin Williamson at NRO calculates the national debt out to $140 trillion.

But while you wipe up the coffee that just came out your nose, I should note that the lion’s share of that number comes from counting the combined total of all Social Security and Medicare liabilities for everyone currently alive and assuming that they will continue to grow at current rates. Williamson justifies this by reference to rules for business accounting which require businesses to account for known future liabilities against present-day earnings. This application sounds reasonable until you think about it. Businesses are required to account for future liabilities because those are certain to impact, while future earnings are not counted because they are merely speculative. But government, for better or worse, doesn’t work like that. The only certainties in life are death and taxes, so the silver lining of that aphorism is that future income for the government is certainty that there will be future revenue that must be counted against future liabilities in a way we never would for businesses.

Moreover, the assumption that medical costs will continue to increase at the same pace as at present is the accounting version of the infamous global warming “hockey stick” scam. It requires we ignore the nature of market economics and assume that providers will charge more than people can ever possibly pay and that the government will agree to pay it. The more reasonable assumption, even without health care “reform”, is that increases in medical costs are inevitably going to level off. This effect will come nowhere near eliminating the vast Medicare shortfall (and Congressional Democrats need to know that there are limits to how much they can cut payments to providers before providers simply drop out of the Medicare market), but it does call into question the amount of exaggeration built in to Williamson’s calculations.

All in all, we can probably safely assume that about 50% of Williamson’s calculations can be attributed to exaggeration, double-counting of debt (e.g. his treatment of the Social Security trust fund counts debt twice), and assuming future revenue doesn’t exist. That still leaves a massive problem that few in the existing political system are willing to address. Democrats in particular are weak on this point, as many in the Obama administration as well as Democrats in Congress and progressives in various interest groups continue to push for more unfunded entitlement obligations instead of less while promising that someone else (e.g. the nameless, faceless, bottomless, consequence-free pit of money that is supposedly “the rich”) will pay for it.

The fundamental fact is that promises for existing entitlements are a lie, let alone promises for expanded entitlements. The money simply isn’t available to cover even a halved $70 billion estimate of future liabilities unfunded by present revenue rates. All the potential sources of funding for grand entitlement plans are frankly just myths:

– “Tax the rich”: Progressives talk about “the rich” paying more taxes (they usually call it a “fair share”, but never define that loaded term in any meaningful way), but such talk is simply ignorant of the fact that “the rich” pay the vast majority of the taxes now anyway. Moreover, “the rich” would have to absorb any increases in future taxes by decreasing other investments (its not like they are just storing the money under mattresses). That means increased taxes automatically decrease the amount of money available for lending (that means higher interest rates) and for investments in business expansion (that means increased unemployment, which decreases revenue and increases government spending). The idea that entitlement spending can be funded by “the rich” is a fiction spread by the economically ignorant.

– Mandate lower health care prices: This is a favorite of health care reform supporters, led by President Obama. The idea is that savings in future Medicare expenditures can be obtained by simply paying doctors less for Medicare patients and by putting regulations on insurance companies that require they charge less for health insurance, leading them to force doctors to pay less for services as well. It sounds simple — just force everyone to charge less and we’ll all pay less, right? Unfortunately, centuries of history proves that price controls never work. Instead, price controls simply decrease the amount of something available in the market (many doctors are already refusing to accept Medicare patients because the payment rates that Democrats want to cut further are already too low for them to cover their escalating tort liabilities which Democrats refuse to even talk about reforming), which increases costs further due to the inflexible laws of supply and demand.

– Single-payer health care: The Moby Dick of progressive politics, single-payer health care is the idea of mandating cost limits on steroids. The notion is that doctors couldn’t flee the system nor increase costs on private patients if every doctor worked for the government and every patient was required to use government doctors and pay rates determined by the government. Leaving aside the issues of doctor choice, however, experience in other countries indicates that real cost limits are often illusory and come only by embracing harsh limits on individual freedoms and a vast expansion of the power given to bureaucratic bodies to determine not only end-of-life choices (so-called “death panels”) but also individual behavior, including diet and exercise choices. Even if these could limit costs somewhat (and the evidence from other countries is mixed at best and complicated by the fact that those other countries have been helped by their patients’ ability to use the private U.S. health care system as a supplement to mitigate rationing problems), they can only do so by restricting individual freedoms in ways unacceptable to any but fans of former Soviet methods. Moreover, such savings would even then not come close to eliminating the looming budgetary gap.

The upshot is that the only solution is fundamental rethinking of entitlements as well as broader government spending practices. Social Security and Medicare don’t need expansion, they need dramatic cutbacks. Needs-testing is a start, eliminating access to entitlement programs for those that don’t need it. Reducing benefits is also a necessity — there is no way to sustainably give retirees pay increases that workers aren’t getting. The bottom line is that, just like their compatriots across the Atlantic, progressives need to give up their fantasy of the nurturing welfare state. We can’t pay for it.

The fiscal fix process also needs to roam further afield. Conservatives need to swallow the necessity that defense spending go under the knife just as much as entitlements. The trillion-dollar defense budget is vastly out-of-proportion to the kind of small-unit, back-alley fights of post-modern warfare. And, while avoiding the “tax the rich” fantasy world, carefully targeted revenue increases are also essential.

It’s time to stop hiding behind budget myths.