The Evansville Courier Press has a pretty good editorial on the federal deficit reduction issue.
I have one quibble, that is minor in one respect but important to the framing in another. The CP says:
President Barack Obama has urged Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts for all but high-income individuals and families. It’s the right thing to do if we’re going to attack the deficit problem.
Letting the tax cuts expire for individuals earning over $200,000 and families over $250,000 would generate $700 billion in revenues for the government over the next 10 years.
My quibble is that the tax cuts wouldn’t expire for those individuals. Rather, the tax cuts would expire for that portion of an individual’s income that exceeds $200,000. It’s sort of the flip side of that Anatole France quote I like to use:
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
In this case, the law would be majestically equal in not taxing everyone’s first couple hundred thousand dollars as much, and majestically equal in taxing everyone’s three hundred thousandth dollar a little bit more.
And, just another observation, that it’s tough for even fire-breathing conservatives to come up with actual cuts. They like to talk about “earmarks,” but that’s a relatively tiny part of the budget – and they can’t even agree on that. Jim DeMint apparently went to the last refuge of the fiscally conservative scoundrel: “administrative waste.” I’ve heard Republicans and Democrats alike promise over the years to balance the budget by eliminating waste. If there ever was that much “waste” in the budget, with years of lawmakers looking for it – with a bit more diligence, one presumes, than O.J. has spent looking for the real killer – there cannot be much left.
How about federal salaries and federal pension plans? Many have commented that public salaries (including pension benefits) have become significantly higher than the private sector. Should we phase-out pension programs?
The waste could all be things politically unpopular to get rid of. It doesn’t change the fact that it is still waste.
The real money in cutting is in the military, but of course that’s sacrosanct to the right. Here comes the fun! The Republicans are showing they lack the minerals, as predicted, and the proof will be the raising of the debt ceiling and the failure to cut the military. So, let’s see what the Tea Partiers do about it. I’m hoping for some carnage.
You know, a big part of me is hoping for some carnage too. But, I’ve been so thoroughly conditioned to believe the financial sector when it says that, if it doesn’t get what it wants, disaster will follow; that I’m afraid of the carnage as well.
C’mon, Mike, the REAL money is in social programs, which even the Republicans are scared of addressing in any way, shape or form.
Paul,
First you say “federal” and then you change to “public”. They aren’t the same — federal is public, but not all public is federal. So, what is your position? Whose salaries and pensions should be cut? Do you have specific proposals?
Due to confidentiality reasons, I can’t give particulars, but my daughter recently commented on her professional experience with the piss-poor job some “public” employees in the field are doing protecting the health and lives of children in Indiana, and apparently in this case at least, because they are actually incapable of doing better. I believe this category of public workers are very poorly paid, thus we are only able to hire the less-sharp knives. I hesitate to think who could be hired after cutting such “public” salaries and pensions.
the REAL money is in social programs
Well, there’s good money in fogging the issue; it’s been a growth stock for forty-five years.
But: no. Properly viewed Defense + veterans benefits + service on the debt raised to pay for them is nearly 60% of the budget. And that’s while leaving Social Security on the “Domestic” (or what the Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission called “Non-security” ) side of the ledger, where it doesn’t actually belong, since Social Security is not paid for out of general revenues.
It’s enough that we outspend the next 50 countries in the world combined militarily. But it doesn’t provide security, it provides welfare for defense contractors, so they can afford to lobby for ever more high-tech gizmos (at the expense, by the way, of actual military preparedness; current military doctrine calls for 450,000 available troops to defend against a North Korean invasion of the South; as of 2008 we had about 60,000 available).
A twelve-carrier fleet doesn’t make you any safer than a 6-carrier fleet would. Nor does an Air Force addicted to high-tech show pieces, a branch, and a massive procurement boondoggle, which could be easily subsumed by the Army and Navy. The goddam poster child for the Air Force, the B-2, has no mission, has to choose between flying supersonic and being “undetectable” to radar, which it never faces anyway, unless we go to war with NASCAR.
And yet there are howls of protest when Jimmy Carter cancels the B-1, or when Bob Gates proposes to raise the Pentagon budget by only 4%. The Congress of the United States has been rubber-stamping all such programs for sixty years now.
The money we spend doing something that approaches guaranteeing that most citizens won’t die malnourished in a gutter for lack of medical care gets plowed into the economy. The money we spend on military toys, their operation and maintenance, winds up being sold for scrap.
As President, this seems like an easy thing to solve:
Let’s assume our budget is 20% in the red, and we want to start using 10% of our budget to start paying off the debt so it doesn’t suck 1/3 of our money away every year, forever.
“I will not sign any bill into law until either expenses have been reduced by 30%, or taxes have been increased by 30%, or an equal combination of both.”
As Congress, it can be easy, too. Let’s assume we want to keep our insanely low tax rates we have today. Order every department, from DoD to HHS, to cut their budgets by 30%. Let them figure out where they want to cut the money from.
Let’s face it, everyone has their pet program they want to hold on to. No one will be happy if we pick and choose 60% from this department and 10% from that. If we do it evenly across the board, everyone will at least be consoled by the fact that the projects they were opposed to were cut as much as their pet project.
Jason: Do you include Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as programs you want to cut by 30%? If not, you just exempted a ridiculously huge percent of our budget.
I include Medicare and Medicaid. I would also want the debt we have to the SSA counted as real debt.
The issue with the SSA is that it is a trust fund. The safest investments (at least historically) are US savings bonds. So, the SSA buys bonds from the federal government, same as you or I would. The difference is that we have never wrote down that debt to the SSA as actual debt, so it then appears like we have taxpayer money supporting the SSA like it was a normal program.
The SSA has its own issues (like retirement age), but the only issue that has to do with the budget is that we don’t count it as debt. Once we do that, it really doesn’t matter if the debt is to me, China, or the SSA. We still have to make good on those bonds, and those bonds continue to siphon money from the government.
In other words, what the SSA does with its trust fund might be a matter for public debate, but it has no place in the budget debate, other than accurate accounting of our debt.
Mary: yes, public and federal are not the same. The analysis I have seen is always a comparison of public and private industry, not federal and private industry. That being said, my anecdotal knowledge is that federal employees generally make more than state employees, and public (i.e. state and federal) employees generally make more than private employees that are doing similar job functions once pensions and benefits are factored in.
“That being said, my anecdotal knowledge is that federal employees generally make more than state employees, and public (i.e. state and federal) employees generally make more than private employees that are doing similar job functions once pensions and benefits are factored in.”
This is true about federal employees vs. state employees. I’m not sure about state employees vs. private employees, although I suppose it is very dependent on the job. Police (although the better paid ones are local employees) tend to make better salaries than mall security guards, but lobbyists tend to be better paid than legislative staffers. But neither of those are really comparable.