I hate to pee in everybody’s cornflakes, but I’m going to anyway. SP is just engaging in demogogery at its worst. You can cut all the waste and fraud in the world and you will still not balance the budget. The problem is entitlements. They will soon suck up every dollar the government spends. But nobody, Left or Right, Sarah Palin included will do anything about it. I know someone will say, “I paid into Social Security, and I deserve every dime I get.” Well true if you drop dead before 70, but those living on for the next 15-20 years will be collecting someone else’s money. The truth hurts, but the truth is the truth. We are going bankrupt from entitlements, and there is no one willing to stop it, Sarah Palin included. Like a sign I saw at a Tea Party rally, “Cut Government Spending, Hands Off My Social Security.”
Everybody leaves me cold today because nobody, Ted Cruz included, is proposing the real answer. It is what Reagan did to some extent, take off the green eye shade, and create economic growth. Make this country the end all and be all of business. Reward economic activity, make the business climate second to none in the world. Create wealth like it is going out of style. You run on unprecedented prosperity and I believe you got a winner. Stop with the ticky-tacky budget crap, it gets us nowhere fast. Economic growth solves many problems. In the 90’s, the budget was balanced on sure luck. It was nothing the politicians did, Slick and Newt can take all the credit they want, but they did little. The internet boom did it. All that wealth created in cyberspace balanced the budget. So lets stop our stupid fetish on the budget, and plant our flag on creating the conditions for people to prosper once again. Bring back the go go days of the 80’s when college grads were getting high salaries a week after graduation.
Please tell me when/where Sarah Palin has said she is NOT for doing anything about entitlements.
Google "Sarah Palin cutting entitlements" and you'll see that she is, and has been, for entitlement reforms.
Hint: Don't pee in the cornflakes before you know the facts.
The problem with your idea is that it fails to recognize two reasons why you cannot re-create the growth of the 80’s or 90’s:
1. 65 to 70% of the US GDP stems from consumer spending. Consumer consumption isn’t going to resume the levels of the 80’s and 90’s because there is a demographic shift happening as the Boomers age and pare down and shift their consumer spending as they age.
This demographic shift will also worsen the entitlement spending problems. Entitlement expenditures are on the cusp of exploding upwards.
2. In the 80’s and 90’s, we didn’t have the stupidity of “free trade” coupled with a huge competitor in the form of the PRC. Now we have both the stupidity of “free trade” (which isn’t free - it’s mostly of one-way benefit for our trading partners) with a People’s Republic of China whom we’ve made rich with our trade deficits and intellectual property.
Entitlements need to be cut. Everything needs to be put on the chopping block, including defense spending. We, as a nation, will have no other choice but to become isolationist in pursuit of smaller defense expenditures. We’re going to have to raise the Social Security retirement age(s) - into the low 70’s at least, and pretty quickly.
Where is the actual unaltered photo of that sign? Leftists claim to have "seen" such signs at Tea Party events. If there were any such things, they were false flag operations from communist infiltrators.
The reality is Patriotic Americans realize that Social Security is a marxist Ponzi scheme. The evil woman behind Social Security and many of the New Deal programs was Frances Perkins, Franklin Diablo Roosevelt's woman of the night, among many that the adulterer had. Every single Conservative that I know opposes Social Security and other such anti-liberty marxist programs. Alf Landon was both brave and absolutely correct in his principled opposition to Social Security.
And on a lighter note, even the leftist singer Merle Haggard mocks the program in his satirical song, "Big City" calling it "so-called Social Security".
The Social Security tax is a tax applied to income related to labor. All employees and self-employed entrepreneurs pay into Social Security through the Social Security tax, which is also known as Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI).
The Social Security tax functions very much like a flat tax. A single rate of 12.4% is applied to wage and self-employment income earned by a worker up to a maximum dollar limit. Half of this tax is paid for by the employee in the form of payroll withholding. The other half of this tax is paid for by the employer. Self-employed persons pay both halves of the Social Security tax since they are both the employee and the employer.
Cutting fraud, waste, and abuse would include entitlements. Medicare would be cut by 1/3 by doing this, and food stamps by probably 1/2. Social Security Disability Payments would easily be reduced by 1/3. One could cut about $400 billion per year from entitlements without affecting any who really need the help.