Quote:
Originally Posted by buggyone
Now you seem to be thinking in the right mode. Taxes do need to be be raised but no on everyone. Raise taxes on individuals with incomes that exceed $500,000 per couple or $250K as a single filer. Raise taxes on those with $1M income to a higher degree.
Eliminate foreign aid to countries unfriendly to US, reduce the oil subsidies, reduce or eliminate farm subsidies, 5% cut in Federal Agency budgets, government (state and federal) conferences to be held in the city where the employee works by teleconference so no travel is needed.
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All reasonable "starts", but not even remotely close to being enough to eliminate the annual deficit.
Start from one of your last points--cut federal agency budgets by 5%. I assume you mean cut agency budgets except for the Defense Department. Even if all the agencies PLUS the Defense Department were
eliminated, we'd still be spending more than we're taking in taxes. The other items you mention are not large expenditures. Last time I looked, all foreign aid only amounted to $25-30 billion a year. The farm subsidies are about another $25 billion a year. I don't know about "oil subsidies". Travel and meeting expenses? Peanuts.
Discretionary spending in the FY 2013 budget was slashed to $1.264 trillion. The request for military spending was lowered to $851 billion. This includes the Defense Department, Overseas Contingency Operations and other defense-related departments like Homeland Security and the State Department.
So total non-defense discretionary spending in FY 2013 is expected to be about $1.3 trillion. The annual deficit is expected to be about $1.5 trillion. So you can see that to balance the budget,
spending for all of what we call "government", except the Defense Department, would have to be totally eliminated and we still wouldn't balance the budget.
Because obviously we can't totally eliminate all of "government", the only other alternatives are to slash defense, Social Security and Medicare, and/or increase taxes.