ABSTRACT
An enormous stream of entitlement payments now flows from the US Treasury at the rate of $50 million per hour. It is a stream that dominates the federal budget. Social Security and Medicare are legal entitlements, since they are constituted as autonomous trust funds that possess the authority to pay benefits without an annual appropriation by Congress. Unfortunately, there are many areas in which the legal definition of entitlements fails to reflect its public-policy meaning. "Uncontrollables," however, also include types of spending that have no clear relation to entitlements as a public-policy concept. As such, entitlements would represent a national investment in the long-term social and economic benefits of preventing serious material hardship. To Washington politicians, the phrase "poor, dependent, and elderly" is repeated so often that the last term almost seems a redundancy. Because the federal government persists in using a system of "cash in-cash out" accounting, the burden of this informal debt appears nowhere in one's official federal budget.
