Sorry, can’t say today how those cuts would look like in the future now, can we? And... if Obama decided he wanted to cut the military budget and nothing else even, to try to cause distress on soldiers, officers, and veterans, he would have to have the approval of the entire Congress as well. THEN, if Obama’s (or any president’s) tailored request didn’t make sense and the Congress did not agree, the budget would fall back into a 1% cut across the board. No one group would have any bigger challenge than any other group.
Nope, can’t even make ANY story up at ‘tall since we don’t have the Almighty omnipotence to determine now what each agency or department will do each year with their own budget, and last I checked, the One who has it isn’t giving it up.
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By the way, I noticed you just joined today for our grand conversation here.
I love it that the Penny Plan must be getting so... ahhhh.... should we say.... noticed today! Thanks Indomitus for just making my leg tingle today!
Casinva,
I posted this on the blog you referenced in your introduction, so I thought I would throw it out for consideration here as well:
The proposal has a lot of surface appeal, probably to people of many political spectrums, but it just wouldn’t work in the real budget world.
Even under the most conservative estimates, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are going to grow by 3.5 Trillion dollars between now and 2016 simply due to the vast numbers of baby-boomers who are retiring and becoming eligible for benefits during that period.
The only way this plan could work would be to tell current recipients they are going to take a 1% cut in their SS payments every year for the next six years—even worse, newly eligible persons would be told, “Sorry, we have to cut current Social Security spending levels by an actual 1% each year for the next six years. You get nothing.”
Now factor in the military. Last night, GOP members of the Armed Forces Committee tore into the proposed “massive cuts” to the military budget in the Reid bill. Of course, they are not really cuts at all, they are merely reductions in the rate of increase. The military budget would still rise by multiple billions every year. You can forget any 1% cut there.
So we’re already talking about far more than half the federal budget which will never take 1% cuts—indeed, they will both grow by more than 1% every year. The “Penny Plan” is not simple, it’s merely simplistic.