But I believe that various emergency spending bills, totally hundreds of billions of dollars were also passed in some weird way - only Congress knows how - to finance all the Iraq war expenses, plus Afghanistan, and many other types of War on Terror budgeted items.
So we'd actually have to go back quite a bit farther in time, if we put EVERYTHING on the table right now.
Hopeless - you’d be lucky to get half of the old people on just this site to give up the amount of Social Security and Medicare money necessary to bring spending down to that level. You can only imagine the general public at large...
For starters, interest on the debt is a much larger amount than in 2005. Also, the proPortion of ss recipients vs Payors has gone from black to red. Those two facts alone make the goal unachievable.
Dems would say if I don’t pay my credit card with my other credit card I will run out of money.
We say stop borrowing and pay it off.
First, the result would be layoffs from Northern Virginia, D.C., Baltimore up to Wilmington and beyond and severe economic recession for that entire area.
States in financial trouble like California and Illinois and cities such as New York, Chicago, Philly, Boston, and others would also have to institute huge cutbacks and their economies would tank.
That’s all short-term and is the medicine we need, but because so much the political power is concentrated in those areas, your commonsense solution will not happen.
They're more than happy to throw the fortunes of America's grandchildren into the furnace, in order to fuel their reelection chances today.
That philosophy is the enemy. Fix that, and the math will fix itself.
THIS WOULD MAKE TOO MUCH SENSE FOR WASHINGTON
What now one has mentioned over the last few weeks is that government spending AUTOMATICALLY goes up 8% per year.
Just by FREEZING IT we could balance the budget in 8 years
Does anyone think we didn’t have enough government in 2005?
The house should pass a continuing resolution tommorow that funds the govt at 90% of present level and suspends baseline raises in funding. They should not wait until september 25th when Obama comes in with his hair on fire screaming something has to be done by the evil repubs. Pass it tommorow and issue a statement that if the senate doesn’t like it to get off their dead asses and engage in the budget debate.
You are correct obviously.
Unfortunately it would also require cuts in SS and Medicare. It would require a 44% cut in defense. When I bring up cutting SS, I get “well I paid into it and want my money back.” When I bring up cutting Medicare I get accused of wanting death panels. Similarly when talking about cutting defense, people talk as if that is equivalent to surrendering to AQ.
Welcome to the obvious budget cutting club. You have at least one FRiend.
Back to August 2001 levels would be preferable.