Unless you raise the debt limit, you would have to cut immediately 60% out of the current budget. That would spell disaster. Here is the problem. What would you cut immediately to live within our revenue? Notice that Medicare, Medicaid, SS, and debt servicing costs amount to about 50% of the total expenditures or $1.7 trillion. Add to that other mandatories like food stamps, unemployment benefits and you are talking about 2.2 trillion or the total revenue received. This leaves defense and the rest of the government to fund. The difficulty in immediately balancing the budget would be enormous and essentially impossible. When you borrow 42 cents out of every dollar spent, you can't balance the budget overnight.
And don't forget that the Medicare and SS costs will continue to increase as the 10,000 baby boomers retire every day raising the costs of the entitlement programs no matter what is done to reform them.
