>>The money needs to come from somewhere. We need to cut spending and probably raise taxes.<<
Easy, reduce the budget. Shut down a few worthless agencies and you’ll have plenty of money to pay off the debt. May I suggest starting with the EPA and the NEA.
That is a start, and a good one, but the biggest spending is on entitlement and the military.
Those cuts will hurt.
>>>Easy, reduce the budget. Shut down a few worthless agencies and you’ll have plenty of money to pay off the debt. May I suggest starting with the EPA and the NEA.
It’s not that easy. When you consider the budget deficit for this year will be about $1.3T cutting the EPA and NEA doesn’t really move you very close to having plenty of money to pay off the debt. You pretty much have to go after everything that is not defense, social security, medicare or medicaid.
Discretionary spending in FY 2010 was $1.39 trillion, or 38% of total spending. More than half ($844 billion) was security spending, which includes the Department of Defense, overseas contingency programs and Homeland Security.
Non-security spending was $553 billion. So if you close down all the discretionary gov agencies (USDA, Energy, Commerce, Education, etc) immediately you find about $500B in savings. There is $135B in stimulus spending for FY11 that could be cut. We can find an additional $619B in savings from non-discretionary programs if we immediately cut these programs: Food Stamps, Unemployment Compensation, Child Nutrition and Tax Credits, Supplemental Security for the Disabled and Student Loans. That gets you close to balancing the budget.