You keep saying that, despite many of us having proposed all kinds of real spending cuts.
For instance, I’d means-test Social Security and Medicare. You can do that the same way we did it in Canada - by setting up ‘clawbacks’ based on income. For example, in Canada Social Insurance will pay you something like $914 per month as a basic income, and then you can apply for income supplements of another $1000 or so, but those are clawed back based on your retirement income. So the rich get their basic SI payment, but the poor get income equalization.
So do that. Cut Social Insurance payments into two parts. Guarantee the first part, and the second part is based on income. Only the poor get it.
Do the same with Medicare. Set up a sliding copayment clawback, so the more retirement income you have, the more of your own health care you have to pay.
Cut the department of education’s budget in half for starters. That would just take it back to where it was about six years ago. Surely it can make do. Do the same for all the other government departments. Take them all back to 2006 levels of funding. As I recall, the U.S. wasn’t exactly starving for government then.
Cut the U.S. military budget by $100 billion. Let them figure out how to do it.
If all this gets you $500 billion in spending cuts, then you get your $70 billion in tax increases.
2010 discretionary non-security spending was $446 billion.
The largest departments were: Health and Human Services ($84 billion), Transportation ($76 billion), Education ($46.8 billion), Housing and Urban Development ($43.6 billion) and Agriculture ($25 billion). (Source: OMB, Table S-11)
A significant chunk of the Health and Human Services budget comes goes to unemployment checks. A significant chunk of Agriculture goes to food stamps. A significant chunk of education goes towards more college loan guarantees and pell grants. There are many other expenses in the discretionary budget that shrink as the economy improves (not to mention that a lot of the discretionary budget also goes to national security (the dept of Justice for example has seen ballooning budgets as they take on more FBI agents to stop domestic terror)
I believe that the baseline non-military discretionary budget is under $400 billion.
If we eliminated the ENTIRE non-military discretionary budget, we would still be about a TRILLION dollars short.
Our military budget is MORE than double our non-military budget at about $850 billion.
So how do we close a 1.3 trillion dollar budget gap with cuts or show me where I have made a mistake.
I am happy to bring the troops home - how about the lefties whose nominal party controlled everything for the past two years - gonna try and end those wars during the lame duck session finally?
Nah - they still haven’t ended DADT.
As for cuts, the good folks at CATO keep on updating their recommendations here:
Defense: $150 billion annually after being phased-in over 10 years.
Commerce: $1 billion annually
Agriculture: $108 billion annually
Energy: $11 billion annually
Education: $78 billion annually
H&HS: $81 billion annually
HUD: $65 billion annually
Transportation: $85 billion annually
So far they have listed $579 billion in annual savings in their recommendations. I would like to see the Democrats and Republicans come up with a similar list and propose it, rather than just mutter about “waste and fraud.”
I don’t know what I’d cut. All I know is it’s a complicated issue and one thing won’t fix it. Do tax cuts that cost us $3 trillion need to be one of the first things we consider? Yep.
Considering your enthusiasm for that, I thought maybe you knew what step 2, step 3, and step 4 were.
It’s easy to argue platitude, but America won’t be fixed until people start thinking about the big picture, and unfortunately the Bush tax cuts aren’t it.
From what I’ve read, the War on Afghanistan is only projected to cost $500 billion over the next decade, so that’s $0.5 trillion out of a $13 trillion dollar ten year deficit.
I’m all for pulling out of there, and have been for a long time.
So Bush tax cuts is around $$3.2 trillion, war in Afghanistan is $500 billion.
What’s next? We’ve got a long way to go versus $13 trillion.
Which is really the core of it. There is no shortage of ideas for cuts, and there’s even some overlap between them in the center (e.g., means-testing social security). But none of it is politically plausible for one simple reason: the number of people’s votes you lose for any significant spending cut is less than the number of votes you gain. You can overcome this with serious bipartisan cooperation (as in the UK, sort of), but it’s pretty hard to do when the GOP won’t touch anything with Obama cooties and the Democrats all whine whenever Obama makes a compromise.
Then why didn’t you say so. I think that is something most people could get on board with. Heck I would even go for a $1 tax increase for every $2 in spending cuts.
That’s fine but lets not try to pin your argument on the tanning tax.
The medicare cuts should have been part of health care reform but if you will recall, the Republicans raised holy hell about cutting the most unecessary parts of medicare and accused OBama of trying to kill the elderly… or has your memoery blocked that out.
Right now, all we have accomplished is shifting costs from emergency rooms to insurance companies.
We will not get medicare reform in the forseeable future and we can blame Republican rhetoric during the health care debate for that. It was disgustingly irresponsible.
That because government workers are generally underpaid at the high end of the GS scale and at the low end too much of the pay is in the form of benefits to really attract as many people as they would like.
We won’t get Medicare reform because the AARP is one of the strongest lobbying groups out there. Older folks are ALL on Medicare, they have time to write letters, and they VOTE. Don’t mess with the AARP.
I agree that these are two reasonably good ideas that address social issues as well as fiscal concerns. It harms the middle class but in the spirit of shared sacrifice, I guess we can shove more of the middle class closer to poverty. Now get the Republicans in the House to pass that before we start accusing the Democrats of blocking it.
I don’t know what your Dept of Ed does but ours spends:
most of its money on college access (federal work/study programs; pell grants; student loan program)
most of what is left aster that is spent on programs meant to help the poor. I guess we could switch up the programs or let the states become the laboratories for coming up with the best ideas but the money would still be spent unless you wanted to stop spending money on poor kids.
Most of what is left after this is No Child Left Behind.
The Dept of Education has the smallest payroll of any department of government with 5000 employees.
Are you talking about nominal dollars or inflation adjusted?
They’re the ones that want the cuts, why not let them propose ALL the cuts?
And if it doesn’t? Because the stuff about medicare and social security… these programs are both currently self sufficient. Shouldn’t medicare and social security cuts should go towards improving the long term solvency of medicare and social security after all we assess a separate tax for these items.
Cutting 30 billion dollars in the Dept. of education and $100 billiojn in military cuts will not get you anywhere close to a balanced budget. Or are you proposing that we take money from self sufficient programs like medicare and social security and and use them to plug up the deficit instead of using medicare cuts to imrpove the solvency of the medicare program?
$78 Billion for Dept of education; $11 billion for dept of energy; $81 Billion for dept of health and human services; $65 billion for HUD and $85 Billion for transportation? You realize that is their entire budget (and in some cases more than their entire budget).
In fact its almost the entire non-military discretionary budget. So now that you have left government with basically the departments of defense, treasury, state and justice. Where do you get the other $800 billion? Wait I mean $650 billion because we trimmed $150 billion form the military. How do you balance the budget?
If the Republicans stood shoulder to shoulder with the Democrats and acted like adults when Democrats tried to cut medicare instead of using it as an opportunity to bash the Democrats over cutting medicare, then we could have reasonable discussions about it, instead we got talk of death panels and hysterics of cutting some of the waste in medicare. BTW the AARP supported health care reform and cutting medicare because they know that controlling medicare costs are critical to maintaining the program.
Obama didn’t always have cooties. The Republicans have positioned themselves into a corner where they cannot go along with anything Obama proposes. I mean he froze federal salaries and it gets poohpoohed by Republicans all over TV.
The Democrats aren’t my party and I have no love for them. The US, unfortunately, has no political left wing in its government. That’s another huge reason the country is turning into dogshit.
Um…your plan sounds better than mine so far. A little more than $500/month, no dental or vision covered…you were saying?
I sense you’re feeling picked on and abused as a Federal employee. What you should stop doing is painting us all with that broad brush of just wanting to kick around Federal employees, boom or bust. I come from a family where half the folks in my family were Federal employees at one time or another, at least two of them were Federal employees their entire lives. I’ve certainly never felt like “bashing” Federal employees.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I was promoted 8 times over my career, my annual raises would not have kept pace with inflation. Some years, the raise has been “0%.” Federal employees get raises when they go up grades as well.
Thank you, Sam, for actually proposing some spending cuts. And there is nothing in that list that bothers me in the least, save perhaps the Dept of Education funding (would depend on where the cuts are coming from, but I’m not that worried about it).
The interesting thing is that of the items you listed, most of them are significantly more likely to be supported by Democrats (means-testing social insurance and military cuts in particular). Only the Education cuts are likely to be supported by the GOP.