More than one guy doing that. They are trying to get people to treat SS and Medicare like it’s a private pension. A pension from an employer is a contractual obligation, and an unfunded liability is a serious issue for the viability of the business. But SS and Medicare are not. The government has no contractual obligation whatever to pay those, see Fleming vs Nestor (1960):

…A person covered by the Social Security Act has not such a right in old-age benefit payments as would make every defeasance of “accrued” interests violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Pp. 363 U. S. 608-611.

(a) The noncontractual interest of an employee covered by the Act cannot be soundly analogized to that of the holder of an annuity, whose right to benefits are based on his contractual premium payments. Pp. 363 U. S. 608-610.

(b) To engraft upon the Social Security System a concept of “accrued property rights” would deprive it of the flexibility and boldness in adjustment to ever-changing conditions which it demands and which Congress probably had in mind when it expressly reserved the right to alter, amend or repeal any provision of the Act. Pp. 363 U. S. 610-611.

As for the 75-year horizon, if you are familiar with the math of annuities, adding or taking away a few more years doesn’t really do much to the answer provided the number of years you picked is large relative to the interest or discount rate. You can use infinite years and in fact there have been annuities that when set up were to pay “forever”, and in fact did pay for hundreds of years. The calculation would have given about the same answer at 70 years as it would at 150.

I figured (per DOGE) that fraud, waste, and abuse was in the range of $30B to $80B, as estimated by the Republican “experts”, and thus present but not a significant game changer. Now we see it was a massive set of political IEDs laid out for us the whole time.

That $150T to $200T number came from something I read years ago by Larry Kotlikoff, although I never understood what was the rationale for a 75 year span for a net present value calculation. He has been raising that alarm for many years, apparently without making much headway in improved understanding by the people. But as you said, people also live in a time zone of two weeks, or month to month paychecks and how much something costs them per month.

Start with the year 2000 Federal expenditures: $1.789 T
Remove year 2000 SS, Medicare, interest on debt: $0.961 T
Adjust 2000 dollars to 2024 CPI: 1.81 x $0.961 T = $1.739 T
Divide by year 2000 US population: $1.739 T / 281.4 M people = $6,181 per capita
Multiply by 2024 US population: $6,181 per capita x 340.1 M people = $2.102 T
Add in 2024 SS, Medicare, interest on debt: $2.102 T + $1.50 T (SS) + $0.865 T (Medicare) + $0.881 T (interest) = $5.3 T

The actual 2024 expenditures were: $6.752 trillion. There is something like $1.5 T that could be cut in the very simple manner I have described. It’s “marbled” fat, not easy necessarily to cut specific items to reach the total, but every number in the budget outside of SS, Medicare, and interest could be multiplied by a ratio, which is about 60%, using the technique I described and $1.5 T in savings would immediately ensue, and it would be approximately right, because it would account for the growth in population and the change in the value of money.

Some things would be cut too much, and some things too little, and maybe there’s some things that didn’t exist in 2000 that we need to throw a couple hundred billion at, but it would not be a disaster for the country–except to the people who are used to getting the government checks, of course.

Could be a one-sentence bill. Never will be. But this is the standard by which we should judge whatever Congress comes up with.

If the government were a private corporation, these would be long term liabilities, but it’s a sovereign with not only the power to tax but the power to alter the obligation unilaterally at any time and the power to conjure money out of thin air. Describing the entitlements as a “long term liability” is a characterization I used to accept without ever thinking much about, but it is a false characterization as it turns out. Social Security and Medicare have always paid today’s obligations with today’s taxes, according to what the law happens to say today.

A more real problem with these entitlements is that the share of present working people vs the share of recipients is decreasing. There’s currently about 3-4 people working to support every retiree, and getting lower every year as the population ages. It does not matter how “funded” the entitlements are if there are not enough working people to support the retirees. Fully funded entitlements won’t mean anything when it’s 1-1 working vs retiree: there won’t be enough economic production for the entitlement money to buy to meet the needs of the non-working.

The loss of trust in corporate media is making this much less of an advantage. And Trump can talk directly to the people.

I think Senate Republicans are just being weak like usual.

And that is what the government shutdown fight is about. Republicans want to pass a simple bill to keep the government open, but Democrats insist it must also extend “emergency” Obamacare premium tax credits.

Republicans predicted this back in 2010. They knew that a government program like Obamacare, once established in law, would never expire and never become anything other than more expensive. And when COVID-19 hit, Republicans feared that emergency spending, instead of being temporary spending for an emergency, would become the new baseline for federal spending going forward.

That is what happened. Total federal spending in fiscal 2019, the last before COVID, was $4.45 trillion. In fiscal 2024, it was $6.75 trillion. That is an increase of 52% in just five years. It is a situation that is not, as they say, sustainable. And that is what the current shutdown showdown is about.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/3833525/shutdown-fight-critical-moment-in-the-expansion-of-the-government/

I can’t see it working any better now.