31.4 trillion dollars of debt and it's nobody's fault, but at least one man has a solution.

And it's not a new one. I'm Scott Ott with Zoe Rachel sitting in for Bill Whittle and Stephen Green.

And this episode of Right Angle is brought to you by the members at Bill Whittle.com.

Gentlemen, there is an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by a guy named John Cogan,

who I had not previously heard of, but he is the author of a book. Let me see if I can get the title

of the book for you. I misplaced it. I will get it for you before the end of the show.

But anyway, it's a book about, oh, I think it's called the high

price of good intentions, or the high cost of good intentions. In any case, he has an

interesting idea about how we can contain, as conservatives used to care about, the national debt, and get it back down to what it

should be, which is an annually balanced budget. And there are basically two factors at play here.

One is that there are these omnibus bills that contained everything and the kitchen sink that are developed

by like 12 different committees in each House of Congress and the House of Representatives

and the Senate and then all cobbled together and treated as if it's this one big thing.

But there's no one committee that's responsible for

restraining spending. In fact, quite the opposite. And here's the second factor. At least two-thirds

of the budget is mandatory, so to speak. In other words, the non-discretionary spending, which we don't have any choice about,

we have to do this, is most of the budget, what we would call entitlements. And when I say,

and before anybody jumps on the comments and says, it's a lot more than $31.4 trillion,

let me just say, it's a lot more than $31. trillion. Let me just say, it's a lot more than 31.4 trillion. We're not

counting everything, but this is just what they consider to be, you know, this year's debt.

Entitlement programs, says Kogan, have accounted for all of the growth in federal spending

relative to gross domestic product in the past 60 years.

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