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M.D. Harmon: Fiscal alarm's ringing, but will we hit snooze again?

Despite all that's going on in Washington now, it's very possible that President Obama and his posse have actually done Americans a favor in proposing another trillion-dollar addition to the national debt over the next decade.

(The Democrats' health care scheme will really cost far more, but we'll get to that.)

If it passes, of course, the effect of the favor will be substantially mitigated -- a polite way to say tossed in the toilet -- but polls and expressed public reactions are starting to show something new on the part of the population as a whole.

That is, not just tea party participants but Americans in general are starting to express significant concern about the effect of current spending plans on the financial well-being of their children and grandchildren. True, it's a bit late for that to start sinking in, but "better late than never" applies to fiscal sanity as well as scheduling Botox injections.

Despite the best efforts of those in power in Washington to point out the supposed benefits of their plans and use creative budgeting to kick the tin can of costs over the fiscal horizon, people are starting to add up the numbers -- only to find the numbers don't add up.

The Democrats' health care plan is nixed by 48 percent of Americans in a poll average by Real Clear Politics, with 41 percent approving. The most recent polls show disapproval of it running up to 55 percent.

Obama himself has sunk to overall unfavorable status in RCP's average, while Congress is given a thumbs-down by 76 percent of overall respondents.

Here's another poll, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine: Some 30 percent of doctors say they will quit if ObamaCare passes, and nearly 50 percent will do that if a "public option" is included.

Leaving health care aside for the moment, many Americans have noticed the stories that say that Social Security, once described as "solvent" for years to come, has started to dig into those famous West Virginia file cabinets where the Treasury bonds set aside to finance future entitlement payments are kept.

This, I guess, is where I have to ask if anyone reading this still thinks that there is actual "money" in their SS account that is "set aside" for their "exclusive" use by the feds.

You have an account, but it's only a number in a computer. Payments to beneficiaries today come from two sources and two sources only:

1. Those who are paying Social Security taxes today.

2. Money borrowed from the Chinese.

So, if you are getting SS checks, you can go down to the store and buy two "Thank You" cards. Give one to your children (assuming they have jobs) and send the other to Beijing.

Yes, thanks to the recession and years ahead of schedule, SS has to start taking money from the Treasury, which doesn't have it. (See 2. above.)

And did anybody read the story about the Walgreens drugstore chain in Washington state saying it won't fill any Medicare prescriptions after April 16 due to reimbursement rates falling 50 percent below the cost of supplying the drugs?

It's already hard in many places to find doctors willing to take on new Medicaid patients -- or, in some cases, to take on any at all. How will that improve when the government adds millions of people to the covered population?

But, you say, the Congressional Budget Office just said that the whole thing will come in at $940 billion over the next 10 years. Surely that's not going to break the bank?

Leaving aside the fact the bank's already broken -- deficits under Obama will total in two years what those under Bush totaled in eight, with more red ink to come no matter what happens on health care -- the CBO was required to use parameters set by Congress for its estimates.

And Congress told it to start applying revenues immediately to benefits that wouldn't be paid out until fiscal 2014.

As blogger Ed Morrissey said Thursday, "If it kicked in right away, the decade-long estimate would obviously be well into the trillions. So they simply stalled it for four years, incurring just $17 billion in costs -- or 1.8 percent of the total 10-year estimate -- through 2013 so that wavering Democrats could go back to their districts and tell baldfaced lies to their constituents about the pricetag. (It's) a perfect ending to this travesty."

At the beginning of the current fiscal year, the CBO said that the shortfall required to pay Medicare benefits out to 2075 was $35 trillion (with a T).

Social Security's shortfall over the same period was a mere $5.3 trillion. Just peanuts.

In fact, our fiscal situation has fallen into that category of events covered by the truism that says, "If something can't go on, it won't go on."

The only question is, will we resolve this by considered, rational action that minimizes hardship (knowing that some will be inevitable), or do we implement one more left-wing ideological template with fiscal catastrophe in its future?

The good news is that many Americans are starting to ask the question.

The bad news is that very few people in Washington with a "D" after their names appear to care.

M.D. Harmon is an editorial writer. He can be contacted at 791-6482 or at:

mharmon@mainetoday.com