If no one is willing to give up any of their public services - let's stop half-assing it and properly fund it. Stop shifting the costs to the future. If we, the public in general, want healthcare, comfortable retirement once you hit 67, safety nets, education and whatever else to all be entitlements and we want to police the world, protect our interests locally and abroad, and fund foreign aid. Fuck it. Let's do it. We really are wealthy as hell as a nation and can probably afford to do it all. But let's also pay for it, now. And let it all come out of everyone's paycheck, dividend returns, and capital gains so they can directly see it, feel it, and, ultimately, decide if it really is worth it.
I wish they'd go for everything: Let the previously enacted (Bush) tax cuts expire, let the payroll tax cuts expire, reign in all spending including defense, medicare, social security, come up with an overall tax code that makes sense and is less than 1 million pages, you name it. And I don't just mean "going off the [current] cliff." I mean reign it all in for the future as well, so that the debt can be wiped out in 10 years or less.
There it is.
Couldn't be summed up better.
I read this whole thread, was happy to see many things I would have said get expressed, so I don't have to (where were you guys in the Opinions on the 99% thread??!?), so only a couple comments from here and there.
-This was alluded to, but never simply stated outright: no one is proposing any tax increases. Allowing a temporary tax reduction to expire is not an increase. If a store has a sale, and the sale ends, they didn't just raise all their prices, they ended the sale.
-Am I the only one who noticed Tooqs chart?
Think about that for a moment. Think about in the context of the common claim that government has too much debt, too much deficit spending, too much waste and inefficiency
and therefore jobs done by the government should be turned over to the private sector.
I could see that argument being made between about 1943 and 1952 - when government debt was used to pay private industry for the war effort.
At any other point in time, before or since?
Then there is Swiper's:
that says that DOD, SS, and Medicare alone account for more than 50% of the entire budget - which means that if anyone is serious about reducing the "size of government" or the deficit, that is where the focus needs to be, period.
If a person drives a leased 2011 GMC Yukon 50 miles to work everyday, they don't become Mustachian by clipping coupons.
Even anti-big-government tooqk is defending having 4 carrier groups! Sorry, but you are falling under that "poll finds American's unrealistic, want it all" category the DoubleDown mentioned. The military IS our "big government". What do we do when a tyrant does bad things somewhere? We send a few troops, along with every other country in the UN peacekeeping force. That's what the UN is for. Our "interests" are being threatened overseas? Well, then our intervention is no longer being a cop. Its being a bully.
-Just in general, when people say they want "smaller government" or to "cut spending", do they ever have any specific idea what that means? Nothing the Republicans say officially or on record ever seems to be specific. These discussions rarely are specific (though thankfully some here agree that military, SS, and medicaid should be "killed and eaten" - even if the person who originally said it now wants to just put the largest cow on a diet afterall).
Exactly what evidence is there of a massive level of waste and inefficiency, over and above what happens to ANY bureaucracy of a certain size? We aren't going to have a government the size of a single-location-independantly-owned-and-operated small business. We aren't even going to have one the size of a regional limited liability partnership. We might come close to a federal government the size of a mid-size international corporation - IF we divided all 50 states up into their own country (perhaps not a terrible idea, but noones suggesting it as a means to reduce waste). In case you hadn't noticed, this is a BIG FREGGIN COUNTRY. With a whole lot of people. Any large bureaucracy, public or private, inherently ends up with some level of waste and inefficiency. What reason is there to think that simply slashing budgets would automatically make it all go away? What percentage of the total budget do you think is being wasted? 1%? 5%? 10%? That's a still whole lot less than the military, SS, or medicare, less than all of the "safety net" programs combined, even less than "everything else" combined. So, eliminating waste is not going to "shrink government" by any significant amount, and will not solve any problems. What's left? You have to start actually cutting programs. Ones which are large enough to have an impact. Which takes us back to the first two quotes.