By 2027, all federal revenues will go to entitlement programs and interest on the debt, said Rep. Dave Brat (R., Va.) on C-SPAN.
"There won’t be a dollar left to run government, military, roads, education, all the things folks want," he said, citing a report from the Congressional Budget Office.
"In the short run you just can’t spend more than you have and every family knows that, every firm knows that," he said. "Firms are firing people right now instead of hiring because they can’t meet payroll. So that’s how the real world works and the only place it doesn’t work like that is up here."
The CBO’s findings show that the outlook for the federal budget has worsened since the recession and policies implemented afterward have made spending increase and revenues shrink and caused deficits to rise.
"They totaled $5.6 trillion in those five years, and in four of the five years, they were larger relative to the size of the economy than they had been in any year since 1946," the report says. "Because of the large deficits, federal debt held by the public soared, nearly doubling during the period."
Brat said that government spending must be reined in.
"So solutions, number one you have to trim the spending a little bit right now in the short run, but in the long run everybody knows it’s the entitlement game," he said. "So I’m on the Budget Committee and out of 100 percent pie, two-thirds of it is entitlements."
"And only one-third is discretionary," Brat said. "So the budget committee only gets to deal with the one-third. And what I just said, by 2027, in 11 years or so the entire budget will be mandatory spending so there wont be any discretionary spending whatsoever unless you deficit spend the whole government."
"If we go up to that then we’re Greece, and I’m not a doomsayer, but you come up on that point and you’re Greece."