At least he’s consistent. Any spending cut he might recommend would amount to less than even “a rounding error.” 
septimus, what is your major malfunction? What, are now just going to follow me from thread to thread taking cheap shots? Get a life.
And if you want to know what I’d cut, you could, you know, just ask.
If you’d like to know, I would:
-
Cut the budget of the Department of Education by 50% over five years. $32 billion per year in savings.
-
Cut $200 billion per year from the defense budget. Maybe more if I can be convinced it won’t seriously damage military effectiveness.
-
A wage freeze for every public servant for three years.
-
Demand 5% per year budget rollbacks from numerous federal agencies.
-
repeal the Affordable Health Act. The easiest budget to cut is the one that isn’t relied on by workers yet. Debate it on the merits all you want, America can’t afford a trillion dollars right now.
-
Cut all farm subsidies and other industry subsidies by 20% per year for five years until they are all gone.
-
Raise revenue by eliminating corporate tax breaks that selectively favor some companies and industries over others. That includes subsidies for alternative energy, ethanol, ‘creating jobs’, and all the other myriad loopholes in the tax code.
-
Means-test all entitlement programs. Rather than taxing the rich more, and then giving them free services, it would be much better to just stop giving them the free services. That way you don’t inject a government middleman into the mix. This would be a huge savings.
-
Raise the retirement age. Hopefully with means-testing this could be avoided, but it might need to go up another year or two over the next 30 years.
-
Slowly end Pell Grants, and scale back student loans. This is not just to save the government money, but to repair higher education. This flood of easy money into education is causing a bubble which is inflating tuition like crazy. Every year, the value students are getting for their higher education is declining because the cost is going up. This money winds up bloating the administration and being spent on luxury and high salaries for the administration. I would couple this with reforms aimed at lowering the cost of education, such as perhaps commissioning high quality textbooks and putting them in the public domain to lower that cost for students.
Oh, and I’d rescind the Bush tax cuts. Not because I necessarily think it’s a great idea (although I don’t think it would hurt), but because I recognize that in order to build a big enough coalition to go through this kind of change, everyone has to feel the pain. You can’t single out one group and leave them out of it. It’s not politically feasible, and it’s not a good idea. So tax increases are necessary.
What do you think?
I wasn’t really interested. But I do wonder if you read the title of the thread?
A large majority of Dept Education spending is on grants to schools and students. I happen to think investment in infrastructure is a good thing, and what “infrastructure” could be more important than our children’s brains? The Federal Government does not operate as a “profit center” so it will reap few of the gains directly. This fact is a major source of confused thinking by right-wingers. Investment motivated by government stewardship, charity, altruism or patriotism is non-productive. Only Greed is good.
Oh, BTW. We have it on the authority of our resident erudite fiscal conservative that the money you propose to save here is not even “a rounding error.”
Yes, that will serve the lazy liberal government workers right!
We can debate Obamacare in another thread. To the extent that right-wing features of the legislation converted a good idea into yet another wealth transfer from taxpayer to business, I agree with you. (And yes, my statement implies some Democrats serve a right-wing agenda.)
I’ve no idea if your trillion-dollar estimate for Obamacare is competent(*). But even if it is, the amount is “just a rounding error.”
(* - You don’t need to spend hours researching this and posting a Wall of Words on my account.)
Wrong. It’s means-testing that would create a need for government middlemen. The present overhead in SocSec is negligible, not “huge.”
Et cetera.
I’ve got little to do with the GOP and these are only speculative choices, but here are a few places I’d start looking…
Kill the TSA ($8 billion). Unless they can prove they’re providing more than security theatre, fire the whole lot of them.
Subsidies for corn ethanol ($9 billion). Biofuels done right are certainly worth doing, but corn ethanol has some major flaws right from the start.
The war in Afghanistan ($116 billion). I haven’t been keeping up with events over there, but last I heard it’s still the same old misogynistic shithole. Are we actually achieving anything worth $116 billion a year over there? Even if we are, is $116 billion worth of saving-them-from-themselves worth more than $116 billion of not-fucking-things-up-here?
Obamacare. When the liberals are blaming it on the conservatives and the conservatives never voted for the damn thing in the first place, it’s time to consider why you haven’t put it down already.
Ah, so even though an article says the complete opposite of what you claim it says, you’re OK with citing it as an example of the perfidy of your opponents because you choose not to believe the parts of it that counter your argument. That’s an interesting rhetorical trick. Must have made you unbeatable in Debate Club.
The elephant in the room is clearly health care (Medicare & Medicaid). Stop kow-towing to the special interests of the health care industry and enact a single-payer system paid for by payroll deduction similar to social security. I’m sure an amount could be found that’s less than the average insured worker is now paying in premiums.
Not only would this eliminate much of the fraud, waste and abuse in the current system but it would also make the U.S. more competative globally.
Means test social security. People worth millions don’t need the benefit.
Eliminate farm subsidies except to small farmers. Most of this spending ends out in the pockets of big agri-business.
Oh and cut defense to the bone. Close all overseas bases and bring the troops home. As long as we’ve got nukes and a functioning navy, we won’t be invaded.
Bri2k
And it is running a surplus.
SS, for the first time this year, reached the tipping point where current benefits exceed current revenue. The only “asset” in the SS surplus is the government’s promise to honor the special Treasury instruments in the trust fund. They will do so with taxes paid into the general fund in the future (assuming we miraculously worked our way to a surplus) or by issuing debt to raise the cash. There is not some surplus lock-box somewhere stuffed with greenbacks; there is only the government’s promise to raise the cash when they need to. And SS can no longer even say that, at least as a stand-alone, it more than covers current expenses with current revenue (cite):
Cool, so we take away benefits that are already paid for by a regressive tax and use the money to pay off the deficit created by cutting taxes on the wealthy.
The cuts I (a Republican) would like to see:
[ul]
[li]End Farm Subsidies[/li][li]Enact all reforms/cuts listed here (Warning: PDF) - They are all small but add up to $200bn or so by 2015 and in the scheme of the 2030 budget they are an important part of fixing things. This is essentially the best aggregation of all those “little things that are too small to care about.” Even accumulated it’s only about $200bn savings in the FY 2015 budget, but we’re still talking about 0.2tn in savings in budget year 2015 and with a ~1tn or so deficit that’s something.[/li][li]The above PDF includes some defense cuts, but I would go much further. First cut the Navy to 230 ships.[/li][li]Second, complete withdrawal from Iraq/Afghanistan by 2015. No advisers, no trainers, no presence.[/li][li]Cap total military deployments in Europe and Asia to 100,000. This is roughly a 26% decrease.[/li][li]Reduce standing military size to pre-Iraq war levels.[/li][li]Reduce nuclear arsenal further (aim for around 1,000 warheads.)[/li][li]If health insurance continues as it is, raise Medicare age to 68.[/li][/ul]
Now, all told that’s about 30% of our deficit problem out to 2030. To fix it, you have to tax, and these are the taxes you implement:
[ul]
[li]Return Estate Tax to Clinton Levels[/li][li]Return Investment Taxes to Clinton Levels[/li][li]Allow Bush Tax Cuts to Expire, both on incomes above $250,000 and below.[/li][li]Currently income over $106,000 is totally exempt from payroll tax. When we introduced payroll taxes the top limit meant that about 90% of all income was subjected to the payroll tax, right now about 80% of all earned income is subject to the payroll tax. We should periodically adjust the upper limit so that it captures about 90% of income so that we are still capturing the same portion as income across the board goes up with inflation and economic growth.[/li][li]5.4% surcharge tax on earned income > $1m[/li][li]Vastly reduce and/or eliminate mortgage deductions for high income households[/li][li]Implement a 5% national sales tax[/li][li]Implement a Bank Tax that is assessed on the value of the bank’s holdings. Banks with under $50bn in holdings would be assessed no tax. It would be around 0.15% (0.0015) on banks > $50bn, so Goldman Sachs would owe about $1.4bn a year. Banks above $1tn would owe 0.35%, so Bank of America would owe almost $8bn a year. This is both a revenue gain and designed to make being so large a less competitive proposition, we should not want overly large banks. Obviously like all taxes it is passed on to consumers, but since pretty much all credit unions, most small municipal banks, and even many regional banks will not have more than $50bn in holdings it means ordinary consumers will have little to be worried about if they bank with those entities. The very fact that those alternatives will exist for ordinary consumers means even the big banks will probably pass these costs on to large institutional clients who may be too big for a smaller bank to server and who are the reason some of these super banks have such large holdings in the first place.[/li][/ul]
Interesting. I’m pretty okay with most of Sam’s ideas, although I’m curious what effect the proposed public service wage freeze would have on recruitment. I am surprised he didn’t propose reinstating the estate tax.
Most of the spending is on the triumverate of Defense, Medicare and Medicaid. You can cut out every single thing but those, and not really make a dent. Gutting educationm, as Sam would have us do, would have no effect on the deficit or the debt and just increase social problems exponentially.
The problem isn’t that we spend too much, it’s that we severely undertax the rich and that we spend too much on defense, corporate welfare and tax gifts to the rich, while not spending anything close to enough on education, health care and social services.
The teabagger fantasy, though, is that all of our spending is goes to support lazy, criminal minorities and illegal aliens in style, and this is the only thing preventing them (the good, hard working white Christians) from being billionaires.
These are some excellent, concrete ideas.
I would suggest though, that although you self-identify as a Republican, you are so far away from what your elected members think that you might as well call yourself an independent. The current Republicans would never, never, never entertain a single proposal on your second list.
Things are certainly different. There was a time when George H.W. Bush increased taxes for the public good, even though it was not popular politically. We can dream of a return to such days.
Reagan raised taxes a bunch of times too.
Obama, ironically, has done nothing but cut taxes.
Another thing is really the GOP is almost unrecognizable from what it was at the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency, let alone what it was in 1980.
As a traditional Republican, I basically concede we shouldn’t seek to be a majority party. Our traditional core is the upper middle class and the wealthy, and business interests. Our role traditionally was fighting back onerous tax increases and over regulation that stifles the economy and businesses. A traditional GOP doesn’t believe in job creation as part of our role, instead our role is to give the free market the opportunity to create jobs.
Note that I’m talking about fighting back onerous taxes and over regulation. Not reducing taxes to the lowest point ever, and in fact reducing them so much that the Federal government can no longer operate. Only CATO libertarian lunatics are supposed to advocate for a policy which is designed to slowly destroy the Federal government. Traditional Republicanism is not at all libertarianism or some modern brand of States rightism that seeks to reduce the U.S. into 50 sovereign states.
A traditional Republican stance is not immediately favorable to most non-wealthy or at least non-upper middle class people. That is why traditionally (and even to this day) we have never had the same number of registrations as the Democrats.
I think it creates an institutional bias to having a Democrat House of Representatives, which by and large was the case up until the 90s. That’s okay, because our policies were often looked upon favorably by independents, especially when Democrats went too far. In essence we served as a mature check on the more experimental Democrats, who traditionally believed in widespread social experimentation at any cost and in ignorance of how it would effect the economy.
Note that I’m also talking about favoring the upper 30% or so of wealthy people, not the top 1%. The current GOP economically seems to favor the very top 1% of all Americans in terms of AGI at the expense of the lower 99%, so unless you’re a millionaire it’s almost like the GOP has abandoned you. We have abandoned the traditonal “normal” “well-off/upper class” and have instead embraced the super wealthy and enticed lower income voters into supporting us by backing crazy fundamentalist Christian positions to appeal to those too stupid to realize we are fucking them in the ass on almost every policy outside of abortion and the teaching of evolution in schools.
Social Security is NOT an entitlement. It is tiresome to see people putting it on the table as if it were government largesse and your tax money should stop paying for other people.
People are taxed explicitly for Social Security. It is a funded program (unlike the unfunded wars). Look at your paycheck. You pay into the program specifically. It is a forced retirement savings fund.
Yes, SS is now paying more than it takes in. This is due to a few problems. The main ones being the Boomer Bubble and a crappy economy.
Even though SS is paying more than it takes in SS has a SURPLUS of funds. It can draw against that surplus and still be solvent for a long time yet.
So, with interest payments it is due, it will run a net surplus till 2022. It falls apart in 2036.
Yes, the government has borrowed those SS assets and left IOUs in their place. Do people really think the way to solve the deficit is to renege on debts the government owes? Under the 14th Amendment can they do that? Or is it just kill SS then there is no one to repay the debt too? What happens to all the money I paid in over the years?
This is not to say fixing SS isn’t important. It is. But the solutions everyone talks about are cuts cuts and more cuts. How about fixing the fucking economy and getting people back to work? How about narrowing the income gap so non-rich people pay more into the system (remember, SS payments are capped at around $107,000). Or raise that cap.
Lots of solutions to try before you stick it to grandma (and eventually you and me too).
Perhaps after all that some other changes are still in order. If so fine. See where you stand then and make modifications if needed.
Medicare is similar.
People need medical care. If you stop Medicare you are merely shoving the burden elsewhere which will have effects to the economy as well. Our medical costs in the US are out-of-control. Frankly Medicare (for everyone) is a better solution than putting it back to private industry.
I know the free market people here will howl at the though but it is clear our free market medical industry is charging outrageous prices for poor results. Other countries have substantially better healthcare outcomes for substantially less money. The free market in health care is a colossal failure.
A bracingly candid assessment. I might have said very much the same thing, but as an indictment. Sad, perhaps, that there is no hint of regret or repentance, but the honesty can hardly be doubted.
It’s much more powerful coming from Martin Hyde than from you.
And I don’t require regret or repentance - honesty is enough for me. The party left Martin Hyde, he didn’t make them into what they are today.
Martin, in all seriousness,you really ought to consider which party more closely represents today the approach to governance you favor, and if you are really advancing or retarding progress in implementing that approach by maintaining your traditional association.