So what do you think of the spending cuts?

I think they need to cut a LOT deeper!

I think that there is a lot of fat that needs to be trimmed, but I think that hyper-partisanship will prohibit certain things from being touched while old-fashioned incompetence will cut other things wrong, either too much or too little.

Regardless, I don’t see the next budget (or the next, or the next, or the next….) being any better.

And I don’t see the economy or employment the next year ( or the next, or the next, or the next ) being any better.

I’m with @jerv on this one. The Planned Parenthood defunding in the House may likely be defeated in the Senate, after vigorous debate, and then all that time is wasted. Sigh.

I wonder what would happen if they cut down everything by a certain percentage. Wouldn’t that be a good way to start? What if they dove into the individual budgets to see what types of funding could be cut everywhere?

I could care less that each party has their pet projects. I’m just disgusted that the budget cuts seem to be intentionally inflammatory, so that the people know they won’t get passed, and they can say “See? We tried – but we got blocked by the opposing party. We need more power!”

From my perspective the cuts are all posturing, but not realistic or effective. You want to reduce the deficit? Improve the Health Care Reform instead of trying to gut it. Eliminate the Bush tax cuts for the 2% most wealthy. And restructure business taxes so that the burden does not fall on small companies but on large corporations.

Thinking on a totally local level, because I’m infuriated by the new Florida governor, they’re cutting all the wrong things.

Bye bye, high-speed rail – the huge infrastructure project that will create thousands of jobs.
Bye bye, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. for about 200,000 poor women, children, kids and elderly.
Education? Who needs it? We’re already the state with the highest dropout rate in the country, but if we get these kids an edda-ma-kay-shun, how are they going to grow up to be the mindless, oppressed consumer masses we’re counting to fund our private aircraft?

@Seek_Kolinahr – the last two Florida governors weren’t much better though, were they. ;-)

PS – welcome back.

Isn’t cutting preventative programs the most asinine and counterproductive place to save money? We spend a billon dollars on a fighter plance and then cut PP, WIC, etc just because they don’t vote like some other groups.

@Season_of_Fall You present a false dilemma. We can want them to get down to business without thinking that any particular group’s funding should be cut off completely.

One of the easiest things to do is take studies that are currently done every year and do them every other year instead. Start with the studies that never wind up being looked at annually in the first place.

In the city where I grew up, for instance, the pollution level in a nearby lake was studied by the federal government every year. Talking to one of the testers, I learned that they couldn’t really get much out of two-year trends and needed a decade’s worth of data to draw conclusions.

Fair enough, I thought, but would ten data points be better than five? Turns out not, according to the tester. Worse yet, the same study was done by the state every year, and the data was not being shared between the federal and state employees. A little coordination could save a lot of money.

Thank god there getting down to business. Unfortunately this can’t be fixed quickly. Determining what are the right cuts is a time consuming process and we don’t have the time. Typically when faced with a major revenue shortfall, you look for anything that can be cut without crippling you and cut it. At the same time you freeze all new spending and lock down budgets. Unfortunately we’re in a situation where budgets have been increased by several thousand percent in some cases and not at all in others. The stimulus, Omnibus, and all the other projects have been rolled into budgets that make a simple freeze unworkable.

Pick a point in time when you though things were working reasonably well. I don’t care if it was during Clinton or Bush, hell go back to Bush 1 if you want. Add in a reasonable growth rate and lock in the budgets at that point. That should provide a reasonable starting point and give us the time to find the waste, the duplication, and the inefficiencies.

Obama hinted at looking for the duplication of efforts during his SotU. It is one of the few things from him, that I agree with. There is a lot of money to be found in the duplication between agencies and between federal and state. We can do all this with little impact on essential services but we need to let go of our prejudices.

If you don’t like the cuts proposed, submit your own, we can work out a compromise. But if you only whine that they didn’t cut what I wanted cut, you’re not helping the process.

@Jaxk

Well said! : )

I’m not for targeting certain areas and selections based on partisan motives. I’m all for cuts but not start with cuts that help people in crisis but stuff that we don’t need and research that can wait.

It seems odd to me that they are cutting some pretty high profile things that are very important to large groups. Surely priorities can be set based on what is critical and what is not. On a micro level, I wouldn’t expect to provide my child with violin lessons if I’m having a hard time putting food on the table. Violin lessons are important BUT, it needs to take its place in what is critical if we are in crisis.

The first renaissance occurred because of wealth and time. We need to postpone the American renaissance spending.

I remember a blurb in a college textbook about how much would be saved if we eliminated the penny. I realize stuff like that is probably only a fraction of the budget, but that should be the first stuff.

I wonder how many non-critical programs are still in this budget. It seems that technology is such that the national budget could be online, so it all wasn’t so vague.
Does anyone know of any such source?

Going to look through this. Wish me luck.

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/

summaries:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BUDGET-2012-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2012-BUD-29.pdf

I would, along with “duplication”, see a lot more consolidation of agencies. Some of the blame for the financial crisis lies in the separation of financial regulation (Treasury v. the Fed v. the SEC) even if they’re sub-agencies of a single umbrella. Proving their individual value oddly disincentivizes information sharing.

Again, though, I don’t understand why there’s not a cut across agencies – why are budgets not reduced across the board initially, decisions on implementations of the cuts left to the agencies, and then additional a la carte cuts mandated in further and additional budgetary amendments? Is there a procedural limitation to that?

Here is a budget document from the Cato Institute. I know many of you think this is a Republican shill organization but they are very critical of the bush spending. The report is from about 2004 but is surprising pertinent today. I especially like this part.

“To structure the process of terminating federal agencies, Congress should
establish a federal ‘‘sunset’’ commission. Sunsetting is a process of automatically
terminating government agencies and programs after a period
of time unless they are specifically reauthorized.”

“For example, the Rural Utilities
Service (formerly the Rural Electrification Administration) was created
in the 1930s to bring electricity to rural homes. Virtually all American
homes have had electricity for 20 years or more, yet the agency still
survives.”

@Jaxk Yes, there is much that should have been “sunsetted” years ago, but like most other things that go through Congress, any attempt to do so will be tied to other things, thus often defeating the proposal.
How about this idea; get a government that cares about the budget, our nation, and the people in it more than they care about having their way without compromise or getting re-elected? I know that is a pipe dream, but it is one way to get a nice, balanced budget, or at least one better than any we’ve had in my memory. You do realize that a lot of the bloat in our budget is the result of trying to avoid filibusters, right?

@jerv

Very cynical point of view. It does however point out the basic difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals see conservatives as evil while conservatives merely see liberals as wrong.

@Jaxk, I asked for no mention of divisions. @jerv, have there been any bills or actions to target the problem of loading the bills up? Besides the veto, lol.

I’m afraid we are in a bit of a Catch22. The economy is still struggling to recover. Drastic cuts in spending or tax increases to balance the budget would push us right back into recession and probably worse. We should go through the budget now and cut everything that isn’t stimulative and that won’t put the most vulnerable citizens in an untennable strain. But we also have to invest in things that will stimulate future growth.

When we get the economy back into strong shape, we can cut those programs that aren’t needed, and raise taxes on the rich. We got into this mess over the past 30 years by switching from a very progressive tax system to one that is in fact regressive in many cases, as there are now so many loopholes for the wealthy that they generally pay an effective tax rate lower than a secretary or school teacher pays.

If our taxes were managed properly cuts would not be necessary.

If wishes were horses beggars would ride.

@YARNLADY That is absolutely true. This is a deliberately engineered problem designed to transfer wealth from the middle class (and what little bit the poor have) to the wealthiest 1% or so. It’s a bit of sick humor that it’s been advanced under the banner of “Transfer of wealth” being what welfare, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security are all about, and that the wealth is all getting transferred to the poor. Truth is the wealthiest 1% of Americans now hold nearly 40% of all the nation’s wealth. The poorest half of Americans own les that 1% of tha nation;s wealth. In light of that, it is awfully hard to understand how it is they who are ripping everyone off and causing all our financial problems.

@Jaxk I think we know each other well enough that you shouldn’t be surprised by my cynicism :P
However, I think a lot depends on the Conservative. Lets just say that things would be a bit different if there wasn’t such a prominent element of extremism on the Right. After all, aren’t most Muslims seen as evil due to the rantings/actions of a small minority?

@Season_of_Fall Not to my knowledge.Such things are almost as integral to our political machinery as the two-party system. I think that the original intent was to allow compromise, but I feel that it has been twisted into a way to sabotage legislation or get one’s way through exploiting the Law of Unintended Consequences.
I mean, opposing a bill/budget full of pork and “gotchas” can easily be twisted into, “Senator so-and-so likes killing babies!” even if the actual reason that said Senator vetoed a budget proposal was because one of it’s clauses decriminalized first-degree Murder if the victim was a doctor that provided abortions or granting a state millions of dollars to build a bridge to nowhere.
Both parties like to insert their agenda wherever they can, and when they are blocked from doing so, they filibuster everything and shut down Congress until they get their way. I thought that a person had to be 25 or 30 depending on which house to serve in the legislature, but a lot of times they act closer to 3 and I don’t think there is much that can be done about that.

@jerv

Define ‘a small minority’.

Earmark legislation has been proposed in the past and we may very well be in the mood to get it this time. Legislation to prevent unrelated amendments would put significant dent in the process. It’s too subjective to get it all but at least if a congressman had to explain how it relates it would at least, be exposed to the light of day.

The line itemn veto has been proposed many times but I doubt that would have the desired effect. Afterall, the president is not exactly an unbiased observer.

@Jaxk I also think that requiring legislators to actually read a bill before voting for/against it would help. How many rubber-stamped the Patriot Act without fully grokking it?

In order to facilitate that though, I think that we would have to strip a lot of the legalese that introduced loopholes and write them a bit plainer and shorter so that they spend less time reading and more time debating and enacting. Anything other than an itemized budget that takes hundreds of pages to detail is probably toxic anyways :D

@jerv

Yes but the patriot act at 342 pages is dwarfed by things like the Health care (2700 pages) or financial reform (2300 pages). The bills just keep getting bigger and bigger. And even forgetting the shear size, the complexity is unreal. Have you tried reading one of these? You need the entire library of congress in front of you to get all the references and modifications.

Can 150 econmists ALL be wrong??

Less Spending, More Jobs: 150 Economists Call for Spending Cuts to Boost the Economy
Posted by Speaker Boehner Press Office on February 13, 2011

Speaker Boehner this morning sent to President Obama a statement from 150 American economists urging an end to “stimulus” spending and calling for immediate spending cuts to boost our economy and help create a better environment for job creation in America. Here is the letter from Speaker Boehner to the President and the statement from economists:

http://www.speaker.gov/Blog/default.aspx?postid=224851

@CaptainHarley

Well, unfortunately – economists are wrong all the time. Considering the major fail of the majority public refusal to recognize the housing bubble – I’m inclined to think that the more economists that agree with a particular position, the more likely it is that the position is discounting human psychology as a factor in the market.

@Jaxk So basically you are saying that many of our laws are passed without due diligence? I mean, I know how long it took me to read Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle which has a page count somewhere between those two, so I can’t imagine that our Congress-things know what they are actually enacting!

You know, there is a fine line between cynical and depressed, and I think I am drifting to the other side of that line now.

@CaptainHarley Well, there are also at least 150 economists who have opposing viewpoints. Opinions are like assholes…

@CaptainHarley As there are at least 100 times that number of economists in the US alone, I rather think we could find 150 economists willing to sign a letter stating something directly to the contrary of Boehner’s letter.

@jerv

Well if you’re drifting, come on over to the ‘Dark Side’. I think they have a term for you, ‘Cynical depression’ (or is that clinical depression). Hell, close enough.

@jaxk, or anyone, tell me more about what you know about earmark legislation. Don’t get me wrong, I know there have been great minds at work trying to improve the process and don’t think I can add anything, but, here’s the original thought, is the time right, are the American people routed from complacency enough to look at this again. That way we can stop the pork barrel bull shit add ons.

@Season_of_Fall

There was legislation to eliminate pork but it failed last November. “The proposal, sponsored by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, was voted down in a 39–56 vote.” The problem was in the way it was proposed and required a super-majority. It’s not clear that they really wanted it passed. But getting it up for vote was fairly significant.

Those in favor of ‘earmarks will argue that it is less than 1% of the budget and as such is an insignificant piece. The problem however, is much bigger than that. It creates a system of favors and handouts than corrupts everything. You may only be proposing a few hundred million for your pet project, trivial in the scope of the federal budget. The recipient of those funds however see it as huge. Consequently they are constantly trying to curry favor with representatives to get this money. Lobbyists of every stripe are banging at their door. And of course the system of barter in congress adds fuel to this fire. I’ll vote for your bill if you’ll agree to my earmark. How many pieces legislation would have not passed without these special favors. The whole system feeds on itself.

We are (hopefully) entering a new phase of fiscal responsibility. The public seems to want less spending and earmarks are not essential services. If you live in Kansas and you want your potholes fixed, fix them your own damned self. Federal money is just not appropriate. I suspect we’ll see this revisited in the near future. I can only hope it is successful.