It seems odd that nobody, not Lou Dobbs or Cavuto or Kudlow ever make your point about the consolidated budget.
They talk about how 40 cents of every dollar spent is being borrowed, but in reality, SS revenues are still breaking even and Medicare is only a $100B shortfall. This means the entire deficit is due to non-SS/M expenditures.
Publicly-held companies (including the ones they work for) want the Federal feeding trough to stay open.
Federal spending includes not only Federal employee salaries, but everything purchased by the government, i.e., goods and services.
This is includes everything from soft drinks to shoes to insurance to airplanes.
If Federal spending of this nature is cut, corporate America would lose Sales.
CEO’s of publicly-held companies will always respond that this would devastate the economy if Federal spending is cut too quickly.
In truth, total business sales in the U.S. were $13.5 trillion in 2010. So cutting government spending on purchases of products and services by $1 trillion per year would not even be 10% of all U.S. business sales for one year.
The driving factor in the CEO viewpoint is that most government purchases are made from large companies (theirs) that have strong lobbying.
So it’s the Sales figures for large companies that would be pinched a little; most small companies do not rely very much on sales to the Federal government. While some small businesses would indirectly lose some sales, cutting Federal spending would simply require that businesses both small and large reallocate resources to get into businesses that do not sell the the Federal government. As that was accomplished over the span of a few short years, the problem of relying on the government for sales would be solved and with far less financial pain that imagined.
The news media industry, i.e., the large publicly-held employers of Dobbs, Cavuto, Kudlow, etc., do not want to poo-poo the interests held near and dear by other large corporations.
Healthcare is a classic case of this: everyone knows that the healthcare industry as a whole is way overcharging for their products and services because there is little real competition. But by the same token, no one on the air wants to see the Sales figures for healthcare companies go down, which would make their stock price go down and generate layoffs. The news media likes a rosy economic picture, and they think that big companies make up the important parts of that picture.
My view may sound leftist/anti-capitalist on the surface, but if one thinks for a moment - free enterprise is not founded on the wonderful principles of price gouging with a rigged, non-competitive marketplace. Quite the contrary, competition is supposed to counterbalance efforts to price gouge.
The “powers that be” are completely misguiding everyone in the simple arithmetic of the economy. Taxes are an expenditure made by people and businesses for which they get nothing direct and tangible in return (other than those feeding at the trough, of course). So for the person or business that actually pays taxes, they are purely an overhead burden, part of the cost of operating in a nation protected by a military and served by a system of justice. The optimal arrangement is to have that overhead cost be as low as possible and still have the necessary functions provided.
Government tax and spend redistribution schemes only entice people to stop producing and become part of overhead.