It is really a farce to watch the budget battles in Washington unfold. President Obama has proposed a budget for next year that does not manage to cut spending by even one cent. He calculates the trillion dollar cuts that he claims by comparing the proposed budget against the amount that would have been spent if all increases had continued as previously announced. In other words, Obama is cutting the rate of growth when compared to a mythical budget that we are supposed to assume would have been spent. What utter nonsense. The GOP is trying to cut 100 billion dollars off of the spending for the remainder of the current year. This cut is also compared to the same mythical spending amounts for a proposed budget. Real cuts are only about 70 percent of the total. At least the Republicans are advocating actual reductions in spending; I will give them that. In a budget of three and three quarter trillion dollars, however, spending cuts of 70 billion dollars amount to cutting less than two percent of the total.
Does anyone else think it absurd that many Democrats speak of a less than two percent cut as Armageddon? My favorite was Paul Krugman’s comment in the New York Times that the GOP was destroying the future with these cuts. The proposed cuts are just about a rounding error in the budget and Krugman says the world is ending. How can anyone take that man seriously?
What would happen if the Republicans proposed a reorganization of the Pentagon. There are, after all, aver two times the number of generals in the military today as there were a generation ago when the forces were larger. Can’t the USA cut some of the bureaucratic levels in the armed forces? Aren’t there any superfluous bases that can be closed? Do we really need all of the weapons systems that are currently in development? Just because someone believes in a strong national defense does not mean that one cannot try to get some efficiency in what gets spent for that defense.
What would happen if Republicans were to oppose extending the doctor fix for another year? Maybe only half of it could be passed. Each year, congress passes a budget based upon the myth that payments to doctors under Medicare are going to be brought down to certain prescribed levels and then every year they pass a waiver allowing the higher payments to continue. What if that game ended? It would save close to a quarter of a trillion dollars. Even half of that amount would save more than all the cuts currently being discussed. But, of course, that would be honest, and we cannot have that in Washington!
How about if, instead of funding high speed rail, congress stopped the subsidies for Amtrak on lines with low ridership. There are trains that barely carry more people than the crew. Why pay for trains from Los Angeles to New Orleans? Why pay for trains across Montana? It is one thing for the government to try to bend the will of the market a bit with some subsidies for more heavily travelled lines. It is nonsense for Washington to fund trains that carry few passengers. If the issue is transportation from certain poorly served cities, how about using busses? It would save a lot.
1 comment:
The budget submission by the President was posturing for reelection. Unfortunately, both parties play "how do I get reelected" instead of let's talk seriously about the deficit. Both parties are guilty on this. When the Confederacy wrote their constitution in 1861 they wrote the President of the Confederacy serve one 6 year term. While the Civil War was an American tragedy, I think the founding fathers may have been better off had they done the same.
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