Ezra Klein says not to worry about entitlements per se:
Where a decade ago the looming fiscal threat of entitlement spending led economists and budget wonks to wear out their worry beads, today a more subtle understanding of our fiscal future dominates. In this telling, there’s no such program as SocialSecurityandMedicareandMedicaid. There’s Social Security, which has modest long-term liabilities and needs little, if any, help. And then there’s health-care reform. "That," says Henry Aaron, a senior economist at the Brookings Institution, "is the big kahuna."
Krugman makes a similar point. Josh Patashnik understandably scratches his head:
Clearly, the projected growth rate of health care costs is unsustainable, and finding ways to change that ought to be, far and away, the country’s top fiscal priority. But it’s not as though the chunk of money going to Social Security and "other spending" is simply an afterthought; this is 15 percent of GDP we’re talking about.
I’ve never understood the argument that simply because their growth rates are close to zero they shouldn’t be part of the conversation. If you thought one part of your household budget were going to expand dramatically, wouldn’t you want to look for savings everywhere, rather than betting (probably unrealistically) that you can get the one offending budgetary item entirely under control?
Social security spending is to Democrats as defense spending is to Republicans. Fiscal conservatives – not equatable with either group – know we have to tackle all of the above. And if Obama thinks a very slow withdrawal from Iraq will save us all that money, he’s dreaming.
The Dish 