Posted on 01/19/2017 6:13:56 AM PST by pabianice
$10 trillion assumes major entitlement reform. We can't get to that number without tackling health care and Social Security, which are 60 percent of the budget.
There are many programs that should be reduced or eliminated for programmatic and policy reasons. We agree about that. But I'm sure we would disagree on the specific mix of cuts that should be on this list.
As one moves from entitlements to non-defense discretionary spending, most of the programs are relatively small to begin with. To get appreciable savings in this part of the budget, one has to make many, many cuts in myriad programs. Every one of these has a constituency that will go the mat for its program. And I'm willing to wager that every one of us here, when we look at the full list, will see several programs that we ourselves would want to protect (and even expand).
When I look at the Heritage and RSC cut lists, for example, or similar documents put out by others over the years (Tom Coburn made a career out of this), I will flip through page after page saying, "Ok, I like this cut." Then I will get to a section that deals with something I actually know something about, and I'll say, "Whoa ... what 23 year old, wet behind the ears staffer put this in here?" Staff gets tasked to come up with a list of cuts for talking point purposes. They're tasked to hit a dollar figure big enough to matter. They throw in everything they can think of. And they're own biases are on full display. They're not always right.
Remember: we're trying to deal with a multi-trillion dollar structural deficit and debt problem, driven by entitlements. A few billion, even a few tens of billions, in savings from non-defense discretionary spending is arithmetically irrelevant, but it maximizes opposition from these myriad small program constituencies. The question is, do you think this sense of shared pain makes it easier, or harder, to sell entitlement reform, which is the real ballgame?
This particular story is hung on proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fine. Cut them. In total, per the story, they're $741 million a year. That's two orders of magnitude shy of being big enough to be a rounding error.
Last time I checked, spending is almost $4T/yr, but SS & Medicare account for only $1.6T of it. Military accounts for another $600B. That leaves $1.5T for everything else. Pretty tough to cut half of that.
Tear Museum
Hear! Hear!
I disagree that Trump took entitlements off the table during the campaign.
He mentioned cutting waste, fraud, and abuse including in the welfare programs and Medicare and Medicaid and Disability, all of which are “entitlements”. Under Obama, millions of people went from collecting unemployment to collecting disability claiming “stress”. Stress of being unemployed. Fraud, in other words.
Trump mentioned “making Social Security stronger”, which obviously does not mean leaving it to coast along as it is. Whether that equates to means-testing or private accounts or what, I don’t know, but it can’t mean “hands off”. I don’t particularly like the idea of pushing back SS and Medicare eligibility to 70. That is moving the goal posts for people who have planned for decades. Older workers should step aside to make room for younger workers, and pushing retirement out prevents that.
Trump mentioned making Medicare more cost effective by negotiating directly with drug companies amongst other things.
And of course his main theme of restarting industry in America and the privatized rebuilding of infrastructure means job holders rather than welfare collectors. So that is also a spending cut to entitlements.
I’d say Trump left $300B-$400B/yr of “entitlements” cuts on the table during his campaign.
I propose a 90% income tax rate on “golden parachute” retirement benefits for Federal employees. That amount of pension which exceeds the national per capita income should be subject to claw back via a 90% tax rate on that income.
You forgot Food Stamps and Unemployment ($420 billion) and interest on the debt ($229 billion). You could cut every single penny of non-defense, non-security discretionary spending and you would still be $500 billion short of the $1 trillion in cuts per year you would need to meet the spending reduction goals.
The big one you missed is that college costs will DROP when students find it harder to borrow money to pay for it.
I wonder how much, if any, effort at SSDI is going into investigating fraud. I wonder if there would be suspicious patterns found in the doctors that are signing off on these “disability” claims ? Doctors that are rubberstamping stuff like this need to be fined heavily, and imprisoned if there was any sort of kickback involved.
I didn’t forget them. They were part of the $1.5T. Foodstamps are only $75B so I’m not sure where you got $345B for Unemployment to make up your $420B figure. You may have included Medicaid or other welfare costs in your $420B figure. Regardless, getting all spending under $3T when SS/M + Military already accounts for $2.1T seems pretty tough. That is the bottom line, actual spending must be under $3T in the first year to achieve $10.5T total cuts in ten years.
The $420 billion figure is for non-discretionary spending outside of what you mentioned. In addition to unemployment and foodstamps it also included Medicaid. I plead early morning post for not including it. Long and short of it is that the Trump spending cut goals will not be met without large cuts to entitlements. Simply cutting non-defense, non-security discretionary spending isn't going to do it.
PING!
How do they know if what she wrote down was truthful??
Bkmk
Who else would FALL for it?
I hope they pull it off.
“I think Trump has “Your Fired” down pat.”
Not at all but he has “You’re fired” down pat.
“The 800+ military outposts on foreign lands need drastic reduction.”
I totally agree. We are the only country in history that I know of to put our finest young people in all these other countries to protect them at our expense while taking nothing from the same countries. What do we get for it? Mostly hatred, I believe.
I am sure that we could pay most of them to go fishing or golfing every day and we would be better off than with them working. Not that I am suggesting that, I prefer an immediate freeze on hiring, followed by selective termination. Our governments at all levels but especially federal are leech infested.
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