I agree 100%. But to dismiss it as "not hard" is silly and implies a lack of understanding of the magnitude of our financial mess, IMO.
Unless you want to withhold Social Security, or cut payments to defense contractors, Medicaid, or Medicare, or do things like outright confiscate tax returns, it's pretty difficult to just balance things out. As much as people like to think cutting the EPA or foreign aid will help, they're really quite miniscule when compared to Defense, Medicare, and Medicaid (and, of course, interest on the debt).
And remember that laws must be passed to overturn many programs required by law.
It truly is a financial mess, but let’s say you had to do with 200 or 250 billion in revenue. This chart only allows 175 billion...less than others I’ve seen.
Let’s instead say we pick 3 tiers of payments: Priorities 1, 2, 3.
Tier 1 gets paid at 100%, tier 2, at 75%, and tier 3 shares a percentage of the remainder with some being a tier 4 that simply gets dropped because it truly isn’t necessary at the federal level. Education certainly falls into that category as do a lot of other individual expenditures.
Then, let’s say you get to cut out duplication, waste, fraud, and abuse.
I don’t think we’d go over the 200-250 billion that many say is the amount of revenue brought in each month.
One problem is that there’s no willingness to TRY to isolate and identify these areas.