I'm pretty sure the costs of foreign relations are seldom mentioned because they are so insignificant in relation to total federal spending. The US spent about $25 billion in foreign aid in 2009, a miniscule percentage of the $3.9 trillion in total spending (.00006%). Of the total foreign aid we give away, about 90% is given to Israel. In fact, the total amount that we spend for the State Department, including all its employees and the cost of all the embassies around the world as well as the foreign aid it gives away, is less than we spend for the IRS agents we hire to collect delinquent taxes!

And if you think the U.S. is still overly generous, we should understand that we don't even rank in the top 20 countries measuring foreign aid as a percentage of GDP.

I'd surely agree with a line-by-line zero-based budgeting approach. But I think you might be surprised that even if such an approach was taken, it wouldn't come close to producing "more than enough" spending cuts. Remember, just to balance the budget will require more than 40% in spending reductions. If we don't change the Medicare and Social Security entitlement programs pretty substantially, we could eliminate ALL government expenditures categorized as "discretionary" (that's pretty much everything that we know as "government") and we wouldn't be close to balancing the budget.

That's why those who come to grips with the numbers in the budget and understand the gravity of our problem always conclude that to balance the budget will take decades and will require massive cuts in the entitlement programs as well as life-changing cuts to other government programs that we've become very dependent on, as well as increased tax revenues. The numbers simply don't add up any other way.