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With the federal debt now exceeding $40 trillion dollars, the Beacon’s Counterpoint columnists—liberal Rick Dollinger and conservative Geoff Rosenberger—debate the nation’s fiscal priorities.
GEOFF: Rick, on September 29th the Social Security Administration published a comprehensive summary of all the various things that can be done to return Social Security to actuarial solvency. The summary starts with benefit changes and then moves into revenue generators. Here’s a link.
RICK Forget Social Security reform for a second. What is a good Republican to do with no immigrants and no poor people to assist them in the final days of their lives in an underfunded — Sorry, the GOP gutted Medicaid for long-term care — nursing home? Maybe aging testosterone fed military veterans will be up for the task. Who else?
GEOFF: Over the first 11 months of fiscal 2026, Medicaid spending rose by 7.7% —double the inflation rate — to $655 billion. That annualizes to $715 billion or just under $2,100 for every American. Not every Medicaid recipient, every American. And, that’s just the Federal portion of Medicaid spending. The states kick in between 25% and 50% of the total expenditure. So, let’s assume that, on average, the states cover a third of the spending. That takes the full Medicaid total to $1,071 billion or $3,150/capita —$12,600 for a family of four. How much higher would you like to see it go?
RICK: Geoff: as always, it is a question of perspective. The per capita GDP in America is almost $95,000 a year. Government paid healthcare for the indigent and seniors in nursing home is per capita —slightly more than $3000 —or 3% of that amount. That doesn’t seem like a huge number for funding healthcare for the poor and senior citizens —middle class folks who helped increase the country’s GDP —in nursing homes. Am I missing something? I admit, I usually do.
GEOFF: Yeah, and the federal deficit this year will be around $2.1 trillion — north of $6,100/capita. $24,400 for a family of four. It’s like alcohol or cigarettes — just one more won’t make any difference in the big health picture. But the problem is, all those little things add up to big things. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security spending will total about $3.4 trillion this year for just those three line items alone. That’s a little over $10,000 per capita — $40,000 for a family of four!. Combine the federal deficit and those 3 budgetary line items and we’re up to $6.5 trillion or around 20% of GDP. Doesn’t sound so little anymore.
No one wants to throw granny over a cliff — remember that political ad from a few years back? At least I hope not, given that you and I are both grandparents! But either we get our arms around the spending today or we stick our kids and grandkids with the bill. To me, that’s morally unacceptable.
RICK: A ballroom renovation? An arch? A new plane? A wall? More storm troopers wearing ICE outfits? A redo of the once so-called reflecting pool? The heli-pad? A political ad paid by taxpayers? How can anyone suggest cutting Medicaid in the face of such reckless uncontrolled spending? How can the feckless GOP — fraidy cats all —allow it to occur?
GEOFF: Come on. The current Air Force One is 36 years old. Airplanes do wear out. Granted, the “gifted” AF1 from, where was it? Qatar? was bullshit. But the current AF 1 does need to be replaced.
As for the other stuff you reference — I hate the Arch by the way — it all amounts to cab fare. Literally a few hours of total federal spending. Total federal expenditures this year will be $7.4 trillion. That’s $20.3 billion/day, $848 million/hour. It’s Willy Sutton time. Focus on where the real money is being spent. The other stuff makes for great TV political ad soundbites. But it’s a nothing burger in terms of fiscal policy impact.
RICK: Geoff: The optics are the killer. How can you ask middle class people to tolerate cuts to Social Security or Medicaid when the government is building arches, refurbishing the president’s airplane, hiring more storm troopers and doing political ads for the president’s party? Those costs may be chump change, but in the public eyes they are a manifestation of the income inequality that dominates America’s thinking now.
GEOFF: They aren’t cutting them. They are slowing the rate of growth. If we can’t do that then we’ll never balance the budget. Interest expense is already over $1.0 trillion annually. That can’t go on forever!
RICK: Optics. You can’t ask the middle class to even “slow the rate of growth” of their most treasured programs when the government is spending huge sums on trinkets to appease the president. If we are going to tighten our belts, we need to do it everywhere. To do it now, when the current spending is astray in monuments, airplanes, reflecting pools, heli-pads and a private army, seems like the politics of Ebenezer Scrooge or Marie Antoinette.
GEOFF: That kind of thinking is precisely why we’re in the fiscal mess we’re in — no one wants to make hard decisions. You’re talking politics. I’m talking policy. Yeah, the Trump Monument is absurd. We’re agreed on that. The Helipad isn’t horrible, but yeah, the timing wasn’t great. But two wrongs still don’t make a right. You can’t — well, I guess you can because we keep doing it even though we shouldn’t — say “let’s keep running up the deficit and debt based on the excuse that President Trump is a jerk”. How did “he started it” work out for you when you were a kid?
RICK: We agree: policy should trump politics but until we get the right restraints — across the board (everyone — the rich pay more, the poor take less — sacrifices), we are stuck with that we have. Sad and scary.
Rick Dollinger is a retired Court of Claims judge and a former state senator who lives in Brighton. Geoff Rosenberger is retired co-founder of Clover Capital Management Inc.
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Rick,You keep pivoting to optics and “trinkets” while the real numbers—$40+ trillion in debt, a $2 trillion deficit, and entitlement spending already devouring the budget—sit right in front of us. Geoff is talking about the actual drivers. You’re talking about political theater.And let’s be honest about where your side wants to go next. Healthcare for all. Housing for all. Food for all. Daycare for all. That is not “compassionate governance.” That is the government taking responsibility for every basic need of every citizen. Call it whatever you want—full-blown socialism is still full-blown socialism. Some people will split hairs and say “true socialism” only exists when the government formally owns the means of production. Fine. But when the government regulates, subsidizes, mandates, prices, and directs private businesses to the point that they effectively operate as extensions of federal policy, the distinction starts looking academic. We’re already halfway there on healthcare, housing finance, energy, and education. Expanding it further just accelerates the same failed model.We already know how this ends. The government does not run complex systems well. It doesn’t deliver efficient healthcare, affordable housing, or competent large-scale services. It creates shortages, waits, waste, and perverse incentives, then demands more money and more control to “fix” the problems it created. Looking at the track record and pretending the next big expansion will somehow work is willful blindness.If we can’t even slow the growth of the programs we already have without being accused of cruelty, then adding several more open-ended, multi-trillion-dollar commitments is fiscal suicide dressed up as compassion. All that extra spending has to come from somewhere. When the government borrows or taxes on that scale, it pulls capital out of the real economy — the part that actually invests, innovates, and creates jobs. Growth slows, the tax base shrinks, and the very revenue you need to fund the new programs becomes harder to raise. The bill still comes due, only now through higher taxes, higher inflation, higher interest costs, and a weaker economy. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make it less true. It just doesn’t work.
Rick, I love ya, but you need to see the light.
Neither of you will get anywhere with your arguments until the public understands that spending has to be controlled. For example the Medicaid “cuts” include no coverage for illegal immigrants, and a work search requirement. (Seems reasonable to me) Yet the opposition party misrepresents it daily as if its kicking granny off the cliff (as you say). There have been multiple other quasi painless proposals on entitlements like the 2005 effort to allow 2% of Social Security withholding to go into a personal 401K type account. (By back testing, if this had been allowed, most contributors would have several hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions in their accounts. ) This would make the so-called “Trust-Fund” problem not seem so ominous. But our fried Chuck Schumer at the time, made a successful effort to squash it. Raising the retirement age by a month annually for a limited time until a broader fix can be applied would stabilize the trust fund.(also shouted down) Efforts to bring more money into the Treasury like tariffs, Federal stakes in Companies that have received Fed aid, private funding for federal projects all become partisan and are ridiculed. We as a country glean many advantages by having a strong military in a ever increasingly dangerous world. That DOD budget is a tempting target for the new DSA crowd, I’d argue we’re better off with a stable world to conduct commerce in, then reducing our Defense footprint. (IMO its one of the reasons why entities like to hold our debt, its like loaning money to the bouncer in your local bar) . We also have a generation that has been brought up on the virtues of “New Economic Theory”, where they have been told that the US the world’s reserve currency, and therefore there’s plenty of money, it just has to be effortlessly printed. The markets would accept us simply just making headway on the problem, not necessarily solving it (like start turning in lower deficits annually). IMO the best we can hope for is to replicate the last balanced budget era from ~30yrs ago. A internet boom that boosted productivity and provided a stock capital gains tax windfall to the Feds, a piece dividend, and a gridlocked Fed govt that spent more time fighting than spending. Can we replicate that with a dawning AI age? If unaddressed, the bond vigilantes will eventually appear and force some financial responsibility on us (nobody will find it pretty)
Love the debate style! Thank you for the enjoyable read.
While the misuse of funds by t-rump might be ‘ a nothing burger’ ( small potatoes) within the big picture, to me it sends a message that $500 million here, $200 million, $100 million there …. Really means ‘nothing’ to our Administration and elected officials. Note: you forgot to mention the ‘ deals’ given to insiders by top officials in the White House circle. They see OUR money as easy pickings. Shameful example of spending OUR money frivolously is just fine — ‘as long as it’s under $1 billion not worries = nothing burgers! ‘
Well, these ‘burgers’ do mean something because every dollar that I put in as well as YOU, were real dollars being wasted and pissed away.
The ‘nothing burgers’ set a tone for spending = and the tone is ‘screaming’ to me!