The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Reagan permitted Americans to live under two social orders, two constitutional orders, at the same time. There was a pre–Great Society one and a post–Great Society one. Paying for both soon got expensive. The cost can be measured roughly by the growth of the debt, public and private, over the decades after Reagan’s arrival in the White House. By 1989, the year Reagan left office, according to an estimate by the economist Roy H. Webb of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, the government’s unfunded liabilities (mostly for Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits) had reached $4–5 trillion, and would rise exponentially if nothing were done. Nothing was done. By the time of the 2016 election, a calculation of those liabilities similar to Webb’s ran to at least $135 trillion.