Feed: It’s Time For Draconian Budget Cuts! - AggScore: 12.9

It’s Time For Draconian Budget Cuts!

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President Obama has submitted his budget proposal, and unsurprisingly it calls for an even bigger deficit and more spending! Fortunately, the GOPcontrolled House is sending the Administration a message reminiscent of TipONeals dead on arrival response to Reagans austere budgets.Obama is calling for a 3.5 Trillion dollar budget. Of that, more than 1.5 Trillion is deficit spending, meaning that for every dollar we spend, nearly 43 cents is new debt. Borrowed money which future generations must pay back, with interest!Said another way, wherever we can afford 57, we spend 100!The President claims his budget will cut 1.1 Trillion over the next decade. Even if that were true and theres no evidence to suggest that it is! that is a cut of 110 Billion a year on a 3.5 Trillion budget with a 1.5 Trillion deficit! Correct me if Im wrong, but thats a reduction of the deficit by a factor of around 115!Lets apply that formula to something a little closer to home. Lets suppose Im spending 45,000 a year more than I make, and Im half a million in debt.Do you think my cutting 3000 a year from my spending habits would keep me from bankruptcy Of course not! But the Keynesians STILL believe that they can spend themselves into prosperity!Keynesian taxandspend economics, the mainstay of Progressive economic policy for nearly 100 years, has been attractive to Socialist Utopian Academics because it fits their narrative and agenda. When tested in the laboratory of REAL LIFE, however, their hypotheses fall flat time after time. The failed Stimulus of 2009 should have erased any vestige of doubt and put the final nail in the coffin of the Keynesian model. Keynes is to economics what the Flat Earthers were to GeoScience!The Left decries conservative proposals to cut the budget as Draconian but pay attention to the numbers!Remember that a BILLION is 1000 MILLION, and a TRILLION is a MILLION MILLION!Our current deficit is 1.5 Trillion. Obama is willing to cut 110 Billion!! But he says he has to raise taxes to do it!! Congressman Ryan recently complained about not having a baseline for budgeting. May I suggest using the FY 2006 Budget as your starting pointThis was the last budget passed by a GOP congress before PelosiReid took the reigns of Congress and began spending us into oblivion, tripling the deficit every 2 years and raising our debt from 6 Trillion to 14 Trillion in 4 short years! In 2006 our deficit was only around 120 Billion its currently almost 15 times larger! Why dont we START with a BASELINE that undoes PelosiReid spendingIn the 4 years that PelosiReid were in power, our debt more than doubled. They increased our debt by 8 TRILLION in 4 years! When President Bush took office, our debt was only 4 FOUR Trillion dollars! After 6 years, the debt was increased by 50 to 6 Trillion, and Bush was roundly and deservedly criticized. In 2003 the deficit was around 420 Billion. This was after 911, the dotcom bubble burst, and the runup and execution of the combat phase of 2 wars!In 2003 Bush and the GOP Congress passed tax cuts, and consequently the deficit was reduced each of the following 3 years, so that when PelosiReid took the reins, we were on track for a balanced budget in a year or two! When the GOP lost control of the house, they had reduced the deficit to 13 of the 2003 level around 120 Billion.It is now time to wake up and smell the coffee. We are 14 TRILLION in debt, so the INTEREST on that debt has more than doubled in 4 years. We are in a hole we may NEVER be able to climb out of but certainly the first step MUST be to STOP DIGGING!You will hear a lot of talk about discretionary spending. This encompasses our Military spending both wartime operational expenses and the baseline expenses to maintain a standing military, as well as all other regulatory and operational costs of government. The sum total of our discretionary spending is around 1.2 or 1.3 Trillion dollars.The remainder of our budget is the socalled mandatory spending. This is a misnomer. These expenses, with the exception of interest on the National Debt, are ENTITLEMENTS. Since the constitution neither mandates nor authorizes these take from Peter to pay Paul transfers of wealth, how can they be termed Mandatory But I digress!It is essential that we address the problem of entitlement spending. Congress must acknowledge that if we were to eliminate ALL discretionary spending and ONLY fund entitlements and interest on the debt, wed still be left with a budget shortfall of around 250 BILLION DOLLARS!! Without operating a government AT ALL except to transfer money, wed STILL be a quarter of a Trillion dollars deeper in the hole every year!STOP DIGGING!! We must cut entitlements, significantly. Yes, theres discretionary spending that can be trimmed. But again cutting ALL discretionary spending wont be enough to balance the budget. Entitlements MUST be addressed. Its fiscal Armageddon if we dont.