Cutting the budget by demanding cuts in "discretionary spending" always sounds like a great idea until you realize you're not likely to find the biggest number of wasted dollars in the smallest of the budget items.
I haven't looked at Obama's new budget proposal yet, but does anybody really believe there's gonna be a whole lotta change in the percentages? So here's the basic layout in a package totaling $3.8 Trillion:
$906 Billion = Defense, DHS, VA
$790 Billion = Social Security
$418 Billion = Safety Net Programs
$760 Billion = Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP
$304 Million = Debt Service
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$3,178,000,000,000.00 (subtotal)
$622 Billion is what we have left for everything else (Agriculture, Treasury, Commerce, Labor, Education, State, Justice, Transportation, Interior, HUD, Energy). So go ahead - cut the crap out of it. Don't just freeze it and not let it grow with inflation; cut it back by 10%. No, let's cut it by 20%. If that's all that happened, it looks like we'd make up the current deficit in about 15 years. Unfortunately, drastic cutbacks actually have the opposite effect on an economy. If you take a lot of money out of the economy, then you make it harder for everybody to make any headway. The truth is that while you can spend your way to oblivion, you can't save your way to prosperity.
It's all pretty fucked up, guys. We're not gonna fix anything until we step up and take a long hard look at all of the budget, including Defense and Medicare and Social Security. No sacred cows allowed. It's painful and the ramifications will be felt deeply for a long time.
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