Given that those on the right and the left can’t agree on a solution to this problem, as a starting point who would object to a simple 1% funding reduction to all spending/programs?
1% of $3.6 trillion is $36 billion.
It would be in effect just a budget freeze. Yet it would still be opposed by the Tea Party.
You might want to start understanding the difference between the US Government’s cumulative national debt and the annual federal budget deficit. Reducing the annual federal deficit by one percent will have basically no effect on reducing the national debt.
It depends on who is proposing it.
If Obama proposed it, the Republicans would come out against it in force.
Regardless, it would not save much (as those above have pointed out)
I’m all for bashing the tea party, but why would they be opposed to a budget freeze?
To the OP. We need something like a 40% decrease in spending to balance the budget, but since 13% of the spending is interest which presumably you cant cut, you would need to cut 45% of the rest to make it work.
The math on the increase taxes side isn’t much prettier. If you want to increase taxes only on the top 1% (or even 5%) you get into the requirement that you double their AVERAGE tax rates.
See above. If Obama proposed it, they would be against it.
Like you point out it wouldn’t move the needle. They want more.
Interestingly, I saw a credible budget balancing plan that required doing nothing. That is right - nothing.
If the Bush tax cuts were not renewed and the annual doc fix in Medicare were likewise stopped the budget would be in balance by 2018-20.
(Center for American Progress)
Yea, I’m a big fan of the “do nothing” plan to. It balances the budget, does it primarily via revenue and it doesn’t require Congress to do anything, which seems like the most likely outcome anyways.
Or at least, Congress should only make changes to the “do nothing plan” in ways that are revenue neutral. So if they want to repair the Doc Fix or AMT, they’ll need to pass some legislation that will cover the expense.
What is the GDP growth assumption? Their website doesn’t say. But this is merely a play on words. Describing $1.2T in spending cuts and another $3T in tax increases as “doing nothing” is just not anyone’s honest idea of “doing nothing”.
The point is that it doesn’t require any new action by Congress. Its all stuff that will happen if nothing is done to change it. Hence “doing nothing”
The main complaints have been pointed out. It isn’t very much money, and if proposed by Obama it would be jumped on by the right whose primary goal is to make him a one term president. They are opposed to his payroll tax cuts and opposed the cuts to medicare put in the affordable care act. Politics is too poisoned to find enough people willing to work to solve problems. The only goal is on upping each other.
Another complaint is that you can’t lump all budgets together and cut 1% from all of them, programs vary. Plus certain programs are mandatory vs others being discretionary. etc.
If you want to balance the budget there are 2 things that need to be done
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Get the world out of recession (the deficit was 100-400 billion a year before the recession, it is now 1.5 trillion or so). If people start working again then they collect less in gov. benefits and pay more in taxes while GDP grows more.
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Reform health care to make it more efficient. About 80% of our long term debts are due to health care. If our system were as efficient as the systems in Europe then we wouldn’t have those massive debts.
Why is the starting point “give us some of what we want” instead of what exists now?