The only problem with statements like this, Billie, is that even if they were adopted tomorrow they wouldn't come within a country mile of balancing the budget or stopping the growth of the deficit.

Just a simple example. Let's say that we cut discretionary spending by 20%. That's a 20% cut of everything we know as "government" not counting any of the entitlement programs or defense. That would only produce a 3.6% reduction in government spending. ("Discretionary budget items" are only 18% of the federal budget.) In that about 40% of all our government expenditures are paid for with additional borrowed money, we'd still have an annual deficit of about $1 trillion! And the national debt would be increased by at least that amount every year.

No, the arithmetic is very clear. In order to balance the annual federal budget and begin to nick away at the national debt, there will have to be even deeper cuts in discretionary spending as well as massive changes in what we spend on entitlement programs and defense. Even then it's pretty clear that revenue (taxes) will also have to be increased.

Our politicians can pontificate on their competing ideologies all they wish. In the end it will be the capital markets and those that lend to us that will dictate what changes will have to be made. In our case, we're not like Greece or Ireland or Italy. There is no European Union to bail us out, to make more loans. In our case, when the Chinese decide to stop lending and when the Treasury printing more money causes alarming high rates of inflation, all those things our politicians refuse to negotiate are going to happen. It's unavoidable.