Washington always spends more than it says it will

From Ibdeditorials.com

The Congressional Budget Office originally projected the Troubled Asset Relief Program would cost taxpayers $189 billion. That was in January. In a matter of weeks, the estimate grew by 88%.

But anyone who has casually watched Washington for a few years should have known this was coming. They'll have noticed that there are two immutable rules that govern federal programs: They will always cost more than lawmakers and presidents tell us they will, and once they're in place, they'll never go away.

No program is more illustrative of the first rule than Medicare.

When it was created in 1965, government actuaries projected that the hospital portion of the program would cost only $9 billion by 1990. The real cost: $66 billion. That's 165% higher than the initial increase, even after adjusting for inflation.

Officials also missed on their estimate for the cost of all parts of the Medicare program in 1990. That price tag: $107 billion, nearly 10 times the amount ($12 billion) that the House Ways and Means Committee had projected 25 years earlier.

In the current fiscal year, Medicare will cost roughly $425 billion, consuming 16 cents of every taxpayer dollar Washington spends.

No federal program, though, has grown as wildly as Medicare's older sister, Social Security, which was launched in 1937 and sold to Depression-era voters desperate for relief and short on confidence as a modest plan to help older Americans avoid poverty in their retirement.

Growth of the Social Security payroll tax rate has soared from 1% to 12.4% (total of the combined employee and employer "contributions").