The fact that you continue to refuse to do the arithmetic of balancing the budget and beginning to pay down the national debt doesn't surprise me, Richie. You continue to want to simply repeat the soundbites and platitudes that can't come close to balancing the federal budget.

Here, I'll help you out. You've provided a listing of federal agencies saying "we can probably cut 75% of them if we want to". You could cut the entire list of agencies, cut all of the entire federal government as we know it--including the entire Defense Department, Homeland Security, the national parks, NASA, all aid to education, medical research, the State Department, the air traffic controllers, the FCC, the FDA, the interstate highways, Amtrak, Fannie and Freddie, the IRS, the federal court system, all the money spent to pay Congress, the Treasury Department, everything...and we would still come up with an annual budget deficit of about $525 billion.

OK, so how do we actually balance the budget? Well, there's another $2 trillion or so that's spent on entitlement programs. So after we totally eliminated the entirety of the federal government, we'd still have to cut the cost of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid by about 25% in order to balance the 2011 budget. That or do a few less spending cuts and increase taxes to reduce the deficit.

So go ahead, Richie, keep prattling away on how easy it would be to balance the budget, how all those spending cuts are simply low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked. Keep refusing to do the arithmetic. But don't be surprised when some of our creditors, probably China, do it for us. Ask the Greeks how they're getting along with their major creditors.

And by the way, Richie, that foreign aid that you want to get rid of altogether...it amounts to a little more than $25 billion per year. That's about 6/10% of the 2011 federal budget. And guess where it goes? 80% of our foreign aid payments go to Israel!!