Originally Posted by djplong

Richie: Would you care to offer some of the areas in which you'd cut?

I mean, we all have our pet projects that we like - and our "hit list" of stuff we'd like to get rid of. But unless you hit the BIG guys (Defense, Social Security, Medicare) as well as the little guys (Foreign Aid, Amtrak, etc), you're just not going to get enough blood out of the stone.

Personally, I think cuts to the Big Guys are more palatable if *everyone* is getting cut. *Shared* sacrifice is something that should be able to pass more easily than a bill which would provide so much noise along the lines of "How come (fill in the blank) is getting a free pass?"

No, I won't do that because that would transform this thread into a spitting contest about the "importance" of whatever agency or department. You know what I'm talking about and you can probably come up with 3 to 6 major government agencies that can be disbanded yourself.

Also there's untold billions of dollars wasted every years in ventures that don't help the nation as a whole. Do I have to enumerate all of those for you too? I know you can come up with maybe more that I can.

This is only about the liberals determination to make Republicans break their "no additional taxes" pledge. It's not about what's good for our country, it's about political advantage.

Richie: I think you're right AND wrong.

Democrats gaming the system for political advantage? No question. It's all a game to BOTH parties inside the Beltway.

But I think you're wrong in thinkink that the goal is to make the Republican break their No Taxes pledge. I think the goal, if I were to put on my Sinister Black Hat, would be to say "Ok, fine - what do you cut?" and when the republicans finally DO come up with something it falls into one of two categories: 1) It's not nearly enough (you just can't get the cash from discretionary spending) or 2) You're cutting vital services and starving people (with some added bluster for good measure). With #2, you get the people all riled up and they come out with torches and pitchforks at the next election.

The problem with the Republicans is that pledge - it offers no room for compromise - something which the so-called patron saint of the current GOP, Ronald Reagan, was a master at.

So here they want to emulate Reagan without being allowed half the tools in Reagan's playbook. IMO, they've allowed themselves to be painted into a corner.

And, just for the record, please remember that I voted for Reagan as many times as I was legally allowed. He was the first President I ever voted for (as I turned 18 in 1980).

Of course, if you want to start a separate topic for where we'll "get" the trillion dollars to close the deficit, I'm more than ready to hear what you have to say. Someone posted a long list quite some time ago that added up to next to nothing because it didn't hit the Big Three in the budget (well, there's really a Big Four, but you can't just eliminate the interest on the public debt).

Originally Posted by djplong

Richie: I think you're right AND wrong.

Democrats gaming the system for political advantage? No question. It's all a game to BOTH parties inside the Beltway.

But I think you're wrong in thinkink that the goal is to make the Republican break their No Taxes pledge. I think the goal, if I were to put on my Sinister Black Hat, would be to say "Ok, fine - what do you cut?" and when the republicans finally DO come up with something it falls into one of two categories: 1) It's not nearly enough (you just can't get the cash from discretionary spending) or 2) You're cutting vital services and starving people (with some added bluster for good measure). With #2, you get the people all riled up and they come out with torches and pitchforks at the next election.

The problem with the Republicans is that pledge - it offers no room for compromise - something which the so-called patron saint of the current GOP, Ronald Reagan, was a master at.

So here they want to emulate Reagan without being allowed half the tools in Reagan's playbook. IMO, they've allowed themselves to be painted into a corner.

And, just for the record, please remember that I voted for Reagan as many times as I was legally allowed. He was the first President I ever voted for (as I turned 18 in 1980).

Of course, if you want to start a separate topic for where we'll "get" the trillion dollars to close the deficit, I'm more than ready to hear what you have to say. Someone posted a long list quite some time ago that added up to next to nothing because it didn't hit the Big Three in the budget (well, there's really a Big Four, but you can't just eliminate the interest on the public debt).

Compromise is but another word for "agreeing to higher taxes". Simple as that.

The Democrats always start talking about cuts to services that would hurt the most vulnerable Americans as a political ploy, as if those are the first things that could be cut. It's total garbage.

There are hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, and if you put in fraud, probably trillions.

Originally Posted by RichieLion

...I would demand these spending cuts and agency elimination if I were in Congress before I would even entertain any discussion of tax increases; although I wouldn't be persuaded with talk. Real definite definable permanent cuts and "top down" elimination of government agencies and departments....

I agree. Or at least they should be done concurrently. To the extent that Congress has never been able to actually achieve spending cuts while increasing taxes is because they wrote lousy law. Putting the words on paper that would require tax increases to be contingent on spending cuts isn't all that complicated. Any halfway decent lawyer could put those words on paper...probably on only a handful of pieces of paper.

The reason that it's never been accomplished before is that Congress doesn't want to actually cut spending. And that goes for both parties. They've both been in power when taxes were increased based on spending cuts which never happened. Politicians of both stripes love it when they get more money to spend and don't have to explain to anyone why their favorite government program was cut or eliminated.

Originally Posted by RichieLion

...There are hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, and if you put in fraud, probably trillions.

"Hundreds of billions" doesn't even get you close to balancing the budget. "Maybe trillions"? Now you're talking. At current levels of revenue and spending, we'd have to cut something like a trillion and a half in spending just to balance the budget for a year. (None of this "we'll save $ X billion over ten years" we now see so often from Washington.)

So now the $64,000 question, Richie. Tell us all how we come up with a combination of $1,500,000,000,000 in spending cuts and/or tax increases? Just be general for us...round it off to the nearest $100 billion.

I for one will be waiting for your thoughts.

Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

"Hundreds of billions" doesn't even get you close to balancing the budget. "Maybe trillions"? Now you're talking. At current levels of revenue and spending, we'd have to cut something like a trillion and a half in spending just to balance the budget for a year. (None of this "we'll save $ X billion over ten years" we now see so often from Washington.)

So now the $64,000 question, Richie. Tell us all how we come up with a combination of $1,500,000,000,000 in spending cuts and/or tax increases? Just be general for us...round it off to the nearest $100 billion.

I for one will be waiting for your thoughts.

I don't have the entire federal budget in my hands, but I know enough that there plenty of room for cuts. I could say practically the whole of foreign aid, for one, should be cut, and then defenders of the aid will yell. I could say eliminate the Dept. Of Energy, the Dept. Of Education, The Environmental Protection Agency, etc. etc. and then get caught up in the defenders of all that.

I don't really care where the cuts come from, but I know they can be done.

Here's a list of government agencies. I think we can probably cut 75% of them if we wanted to.

A-Z Index of U.S. Government Departments and Agencies (A) | USA.gov

Originally Posted by RichieLion

I don't have the entire federal budget in my hands, but I know enough that there plenty of room for cuts. I could say practically the whole of foreign aid, for one, should be cut, and then defenders of the aid will yell. I could say eliminate the Dept. Of Energy, the Dept. Of Education, The Environmental Protection Agency, etc. etc. and then get caught up in the defenders of all that.

I don't really care where the cuts come from, but I know they can be done.

Here's a list of government agencies. I think we can probably cut 75% of them if we wanted to.

A-Z Index of U.S. Government Departments and Agencies (A) | USA.gov

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!!

Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

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.

I used to do the annual budget for our little 10 person enforcement unit at the NYS Dept. of Motor Vehicles that I managed back in the early 1980's. It would take me anywhere from 2 to 3 day to complete the calculations, estimates and documents needed.

Fast forward to today and the statement you made above. How could you ever expect any one person to do what you are pressing Ritchie for when it takes literally thousands to accomplish a budget on the magnitude of the federal government? That would be totally senseless to think one person could do that! A person would also have to be crazy out of his mind to even think they could begin to pull off something that huge and complex by themselves. In Hawaii they would probably say that it would take a whole lot of Kahunas to pull it off!

Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

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.

I never said it was easy, but it was spending that got us to this point, RIGHT!!

It's only LOGIC that tells me that cutting that spending is the way to go and not to bleed the people anymore and hamstring business anymore.

We can't spend ourselves into prosperity.

"prattling?"; K.M.A.

Richie, I'll help you out here. For one, I would start by gathering up every federal study done on fraud and waste. But even to start with that might be a bit daunting.

Tell you what - a little Googling found this:

Fraud and Abuse in Federal Programs | Downsizing the Federal Government

It's from the CATO Institute. While I might not agree with their politics (if I remember them correctly and I might not), anti-fraud measures should be something we ALL agree on.

Originally Posted by djplong

Richie, I'll help you out here. For one, I would start by gathering up every federal study done on fraud and waste. But even to start with that might be a bit daunting.

Tell you what - a little Googling found this:

Fraud and Abuse in Federal Programs | Downsizing the Federal Government

It's from the CATO Institute. While I might not agree with their politics (if I remember them correctly and I might not), anti-fraud measures should be something we ALL agree on.

I don't have to do that. My principles are correct and enumerating all the individual cuts that can be done is pointless.

Spending put us into this mess. Logic tell us what to do to correct that.

Richie, How about we cut it all from Social Security & Medicare? That should get widespread support.

Originally Posted by DaleMN

Richie, How about we cut it all from Social Security & Medicare? That should get widespread support.

Like I said before; liberals will first point to spending cuts that will hurt the greatest number of the most vulnerable Americans in order to try to make a point.

Thank you so much for the wonderful illustration. Your contribution in validating my position is priceless.

Originally Posted by RichieLion

Like I said before; liberals will first point to spending cuts that will hurt the greatest number of the most vulnerable Americans in order to try to make a point.

Thank you so much for the wonderful illustration. Your contribution in validating my position is priceless.

Always pleased to help ya out.

Originally Posted by djplong

Richie, I'll help you out here. For one, I would start by gathering up every federal study done on fraud and waste. But even to start with that might be a bit daunting.

Tell you what - a little Googling found this:

Fraud and Abuse in Federal Programs | Downsizing the Federal Government

It's from the CATO Institute. While I might not agree with their politics (if I remember them correctly and I might not), anti-fraud measures should be something we ALL agree on.

Good article, djp.

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane, who remains president and CEO, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries, Inc., the second largest privately held company by revenue in the United States. Koch and his brother are huge contributors to the most conservative causes and candidates.

So what does Cato say about waste and fraud? They estimate the amount of "improper payments" among all the varioius government programs to total about $100 billion per year. That amounts to 2.8% of federal spending.

Whoops! We better keep looking, Richie. We're not going to balance the budget by just eliminating waste and fraud. Looks like we'll have to cut stuff that affects all of our lives, including the entitlements that somehow have escaped the scrutiny of our feckless Congress.

Originally Posted by DaleMN

Richie, How about we cut it all from Social Security & Medicare? That should get widespread support.

Yeah, Dale. Richie says the government should stay out of our lives, that everyone should take care of themselves. So that would be a good idea...eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Richie says that the government can't run programs like that anyway. And hey, if you cut just those two programs the budget would be balanced. Voila!