Except that* Social Security brings in more than it puts out *"$869.6 billion - Social Security and other payroll taxes" which means you’d just have another $300 billion deficit.
Which should be banked and not used, my friend, as it currently is. Social Security withholding was increased as a long-term plan to cover the baby boomer retirement process in the early 1980s (1983, I think). Are you serious in suggesting that monies theoretically set aside for boomer retirement be spent now instead of being banked?
Beyond that, SSI surplus revenues are invested in non-marketable US Bonds to help finance the current year’s federal spending. So that already helps to mask the deficit position of the budget. I have severe, though by no means certain, concerns about that practice as well.
Plus, on further review, cutting SSI outlays while keeping revenue the same would have the net effect of decreasing the apparent deficit. I proposed a decrease in benefits of about $70B. That would move that much to the black side of the ledger. Maybe I’m missing something. One of us is, at any rate. And I’d still like an explanation for how I proposed cutting SSI by 90%.
Not to mention the budget is only a year-by-year cash-flow accounting mechanism. There is no federal balance sheet that tots up assets and liabilities as they accrue or deplete over time.
Nor, do I expect, there is any desire on the feds to create one.
So for example, if Congress voted on something that created an inescapable future funding need, even to the tune of $50 trillion, there is no financial accounting for this anywhere. Year-by-year budget planning is almost guaranteed to fail to take this into account. CEOs of private companies would be thrown in jail if they tried a maneuver like this. In fact, a few of them have.
But of course, Congress would never be so silly as to create a $50 trillion future liability. That would be insane.
Well, I’ve always been skeptical to the point of mockery when I hear that sort of thing. It never seems to take into about the $200T rough federal revenue over the same time frame.
It’s a sloppy habit we as reporters (me, I guess) have fallen into. Like when politicians decide they need bigger numbers for their speeches and are suddenly creating ‘will save $100 BILLION over ten years!’ lines. Well, that’s just $10B per year and it’s nothing in terms of the budget. But you need to have those big numbers to get people moving so quote 'em out, you know.
No, it should take into account that $200T. That’s fine. But it should be formalized and made part of the budget process.
That way you start to create some visibility into what has been baked into a forward-looking budget, create transparency around it, and then (as best as possible) some accountability.
Cool game. Thanks.
That was fun! I paid for a whole lotta health and education shit solely by repealing the Bush tax cuts. A few trillion dollars goes a long way…
You miss my point. A simple exercise of playing with numbers so as to achieve a balance, without a thorough understanding of the details behind the numbers is just plain wrong. I never said, “Because we’ve always done it this way” or “People will be hurt,” nor implied it.
On the other hand, a detailed look at every budget line item is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I agree, to a point. But budgets are annual and hatchet cuts to some budget areas may very well mean thousands of Americans could be out of home, insurance and food with the stroke of one pen. Their daily existence cannot wait four years to correct such a callous act. Then again, riots in the streets would be a distinct possibility.
Just as it is naive to think hatchet budget cutting will produced a balanced budget, a stable economy, and love and happiness on the streets of America.
When an emergency occurs, the federal government needs it now. There is limited to no opportunity to say, “No thanks, we’ll shop elsewhere,” when the call goes out for food, clothing and shelter. Even when there is “time,” the government makes poor decisions all too often helped by private business willing to sell at inflated prices. It goes both ways. Government must look to conserve tax dollars, just as private individuals selling to government should not price gouge.
Greed is hard to stop when our society thrives on being greedy.
True, but does anyone really think the budget can be balanced during wartime or the current economic crisis? If we’re going to bother thinking about hypotheticals where we balance the budget, we’re going to have to assume it takes place after the wars and economic crisis is over.
(…er… assuming there is actually an end to these crises… 
)
Just assume it takes place whenever the wars are over - 4 years from now or 15 years from now. I don’t think there’s any need to be concerned about balancing the budget when we’re at war.
That said, I do think it’s possible to talk about what the US would look like with a significantly smaller military. The US military has been unusually large for the last 60 years of our 230 year history, and it’s a legitimate question to ask what the US might look like with 2000 nuclear weapons and 5 carrier groups as opposed to 5000 nuclear weapons and 10 carrier groups, just to pick some examples. Obviously there’s a host of foreign policy issues that would have to be considered along with that, and if you want to discuss those, that’s great, it’s still relevant to the topic of this thread.
That’s the nature of changing priorities though. As much as I suspect I’m on the opposite side of the political spectrum from IdahoMauleMan, we agree that across-the-board cuts make little sense. When I have to cut things out of my personal budget, entertainment and education tend to take larger hits than buying clothes or food. It’s about making choices regarding what you think is important, and trying to do that well, versus trying to spread the cut around to every area just because you’ve spent previously in every area.
That’s the sort of thing I started this thread to learn about. Let’s say we give $20 billion a year to counterterrorism - what will that do for us, and what won’t it do? How much does it cost to fight terrorism? I’ve taken money away from the Defense Dept. and put it towards the FBI, Homeland Security, etc. I’m not sure how much bang a DoD counterterrorism dollar does versus an FBI counterterrorism dollar, but the vast amounts of money spent on Iraq didn’t seem to prevent Al’Qaeda from attacking in London or Madrid, so I’m not sure the DoD’s efforts are in the right place. Plus the DoD spends large amounts of money on weapons like F-22s and ICBMs, which aren’t very effective weapons against terrorists.
I said it was crazy in the OP. I think you’re right - it is pretty much impossible to balance the budget. But I find it really interesting to discuss why.
Actually, I think it makes a little sense. I started this to see what would happen if the government had just two priorities - balance the budget and get some health care for the uninsured. Until I started to actually look at the numbers, without even having a real understanding of what is behind them, I had no idea how impossible that would be.
Let’s face it. The average American (myself included) is never going to gain a real understanding of what is behind all those numbers. But we can get a superficial understanding by trying to manipulate the budget ourselves to see how hard it is. One example: I tried slashing Agriculture from $27 billion to $1.5 billion. Since I was only thinking of two priorities, I ignored the fact that Agriculture spends $2.5 billion a year on protecting the safety of the nation’s food supply! I had no idea it was that much until I started playing with the budget to see what would happen. I would love for people to point out more of these hidden tidbits of information for me.
Please do tell us what should be saved and why. There’s so many items in the federal budget that we never find out why they’re there and what they do for us. I would love to hear about why your department shouldn’t be the one on the chopping block.
I think you’re taking this (and me 
) too seriously - no one’s ever going to implement the budgets we might come up with here. However, by goring someone’s ox we can learn a lot about what’s in those parts of the budget we might cut.
Fun game. My budget ends up with a surplus of +$891B. I reduced the debt from 37.7% of GDP in 2008 to 9.4% of GDP in 2018. I delayed the budget bust, pushing it from 2033 to 2070+. I shrank the size of government from 20.0% of GDP in 2008 to 17.6% of GDP in 2018.
Maybe I should run for office.
That was cool. My budget ends up with a surplus of +$600B. I reduced the debt from 37.7% of GDP in 2008 to 1.5% of GDP in 2018! I delayed the budget bust, pushing it from 2033 to 2070+, as did atomicbadgerrace. And I shrank the size of government from 20.0% of GDP in 2008 to 17.9% of GDP in 2018.
But I had to make some cuts that, IRL, would be political suicide. I think I’d only get four years in the White House (assuming I wasn’t ridden out of town on a rail), but I’d sure look good in the history books.
I am curious, Mr Big Damn Fan, how you propose to means test.
Mrs Senior has 5 million in the bank. Gets 3% from Munis, tax free. Struggles along on $150k/yr. No reportable income.
Mr Farmer lives on his family-owned farm. Market value 5 mil but he ain’t selling. No reportable income.
Mr Stole the People’s Money When I Ran AIG has 500 mil in the bank. He could easily generate a negative income with any sort of decent tax planning.
And on and on…or are we just all going to voluntarily tell the gubmint how much our net worth is and disclose our full financials?
As an aside, SS has been sold to the polloi since its inception as a retirement program and not a tax, per se. While you could balance a budget swiping it back from people who were told they were paying into a retirement account, you ain’t gonna, anymore than you are raiding my IRA just cuz some other bozo didn’t fund his, and now I am rich and he’s poor.
We will be going broke, and the union will dissolve, hopefully peacefully. Buy gold.
The Wikipedia article is not completely accurate. I’ll use the FY2009 proposed budget (PDF warning) for the Department of Agriculture.
For FY2009, the proposed Ag budget is $95 billion. Of that amount, approximately 76 percent, or about $72 billion is for mandatory entitlement programs. That means the law requires they be funded. Period. The remaining 24 percent, or about $23 billion, is called discretionary funding. Basically, that $23 billion funds all the agencies in the Ag Department and all non-mandatory programs.
If you slash that $23 billion to your proposed $1.5 billion, you effectively wipe out the Ag Depart and children agencies. That’s because the wildland fire budget for FY2009 is close to the remaining $1.5 billion. It would rather difficult fighting forest fires when its support infrastructure no longer exists. Also, no protection for disease and pests, rural conservation, research, management of more than 200 million acres of federal lands, etc.
(BTW, the budget for wildland fires in FY2008 was exhausted in late June of this year. That meant a $400 million shortfall through the end of September. The shortfall was made up be cutting programs all over the Forest Service because the Ant-Deficiency Act prohibits deficit spending. By August the Forest Service was down to paying for salaries and utilities, and nothing more. Some critical multi-year research programs were lost because they lost all funding. Yeah, boo hoo, until you realize that research into conservation, energy research, food production and protection, etc., is effectively gone. I know of scientists who lost ten years of research. It will take much, much more and 10-20 years of recover from just this budget shortfall alone, at a much higher cost. Yeah, boo hoo, until you find out that the food shortages, water shortage, energy independence, etc., expected in America in the coming years will be worse than planned as a result. We all are inundated with energy independence issues right now. However, the bigger 800 pound gorilla for America is really a shortage of fresh water. If you are crying about the high price of gas at the pump this summer, you ain’t seen nothing yet when it comes to fresh water shortage. The Atlanta water shortage this past summer is just a drop in the bucket precursor of what is to come all over the country. But I digress.)
I never said any department is a sacred cow. I said you cannot play with numbers with a hatchet if you have no idea what those numbers mean. Of the mandatory $72 billion, we’re talking nutrition assistance programs, farm commodity programs, export promotion programs and a number of conservation programs. In other words, food stamps, and subsidies to farmers. The latter I would study to cut. I fail to see why we pay farmers not to grow crops, thus artificially raising food prices. Yes, that sometimes means family farmers stay in business. But in reality, much of this money goes to multi-million and multi-billion corporate farming. I fail to understand why we pay corporate farmers anything.
Oh, I agree. And the ox goring is the problem. We all want the budget cut, but not any part of it that directly affects us personally.
I’m with you 100% there. That’s what makes this so interesting.
Fascinating that such a small fraction of the Ag. Dept. budget is discretionary - is that typical of other government departments? It seems like the pervasiveness of mandatory spending is part of the problem - it decreases the control even legislators have over the amount spent.
Looking at the PDF you linked to (Thanks! BTW ) It looks like the major sections of the Agriculture budget are: (2007 actual program levels)
Farm Services Agency: $30.8 billion
Risk Management Agency: $5.7 billion
Foreign Agricultural Service: $4 billion
Rural Development: $14.5 billion
Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services: $54.9 billion (includes things like WIC)
Food Safety: $1 billion
Natural Resources and Conservation: $2.6 billion
Forest Service: $5.5 billion (includes wildfire fighting)
Plant & Animal Health Inspection: $1.2 billion
Marketing & Inspection of Grain: $500 million
Research, Education and Economics: $2.6 billion
Other: $500 million
Looking at this, it’s hard to see what I would like cut (as you say, once you get a feel for what these numbers are actually going for, it’s harder to cut. For example, I wouldn’t want to cut WIC, but unless you get more familiar with the budget it’s all just lumped in with farm subsidies and the funding that goes towards commercials like those corn syrup ads.
What it looks like I could cut are $1.7 billion in market development and export credits and $200 mil in agricultural marketing, for only $2 billion in cuts rather than the $21 billion in the OP. So where are the useless parts (market distorting subsidies or corporate welfare depending on your political preference ?) They’re obviously not going to just label a line item “porcine pastrami,” so separating the wheat from the chaff is left to us. What would you cut if you were King?
I’ve got little to contribute here, but this is a good thread topic.