"Battle" of the Budget Cuts

Just read this (http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0208/Republicans-vs.-Republicans-When-are-federal-budget-cuts-too-deep) or one of the hundreds of articles like it.

To put it in perspective, this fight is about cutting the DEFICIT by less than 6%. So doing some quick math, lets say you make 60k/year and you are over spending by 60k a year. You are arguing with your spouse about how to make drastic changes to get this under control. Naturally you should spend all your time arguing about whether to cut your overspending by 100$ or 3600$ since getting anywhere near a 60k cut is impossible. It's like debating whether you should buy a new car or a 2 year old car... since NOT buying a car is not even debatable... can't even talk about it.

Ok. I'm trivializing a bit, but this is serious stuff. We're not even CLOSE to dealing with this. We're not really serious about it. People see 80 billion or 100 billion and think "Wow! That's a lot of cutting." If they see less than 6% of the deficit this year, it looks much less impressive. The republicans are now going to vote to block raising the borrowing level to create a government crisis in the name of budget control (nothing new here, democrats do it too). That's all well and good, but it's not like they were reducing spending when they were in power either. In fact, no administration has been serious about this issue for quite some time... not really. And why? Because we the people are not serious about it either.

If you try and touch the sacred cows, you get your hand smacked. The reality is we're going to have to cut Social Security, Medicare and/or Military spending if we want to balance the budget. That's just basic subtraction. Even if we remove all budgets from all other parts of government, we still run a deficit. Of course, that's unthinkable and political suicide. Fortunately I'm not running for office, so I can say crazy things like "math says 1.5 trillion - 80 billion =/= 0."

To make it a more serious comparison, if we put it into personal context, it means that your kids can't go to college this year or you have to sell your second car and carpool, or you have to sell your house and get one that is half as big - maybe even rent... maybe even in a worse part of town. You might even have to buy generic foods, not eat out at all, and get second hand clothes. Those are SERIOUS cuts that people make every day when they lose their jobs or experience any other event that can saw their income in half. This isn't really about buying less luxury, this is about removing things we feel like we really can't do without. Personally, I think we should leave the infrastructure building programs in tact: education, interior, energy, health and human services and cut in the big three. Sure, that might reduce our protection against enemy threats or put the health of our seniors in danger - but it's not like the alternative approach of hoping the problem magically goes away doesn't cause those problems either. That's controvertial and I'm fine with having a debate about it, but for any party to say they take spending "seriously" without talking about cutting the big three or massively raising taxes is dishonest at best and deluded at worst. Right now we still have the choice to make serious cuts in areas that we choose. Eventually the choice will become someone else's, and that's going to be much more expensive.

Alternatively we could double the tax rate and that would also get us there. Can't imagine too many people would be in favor of that. I'm also not necessarily opposed to increasing taxes and lowering spending in the big 3 areas at the same time, if that is tied to a very tough budget control mechanism. We have to pay back all of our out of control nonsense spending and it's going to hurt. A lot now or a lot more later.

 

Comments

[Jess]

After reading this I sort of have an image of Wile Coyote looking the other way while a bomb gets bigger and bigger and finally explodes behind him.

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