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<\/a><\/p>\nLooking at discretionary spending, the picture becomes even sillier. This means we’re ignoring obligatory payments like social security and Medicare. Defense and homeland security is 54% unto itself!<\/p>\n
Whenever I hear debates about reducing the federal deficit, I think of the\u00a0saying “penny wise and pound foolish”. It means making efforts to save pennies without watching the larger amounts — someone who drives a H2 fifty miles to work each day but\u00a0foregoes a cup of coffee to save a buck.<\/p>\n
We want to reduce the federal deficit; but we cannot touch\u00a0military or social security and Medicare spending. And Medicare is 15% of that 28% for “Health And Human Services”. If we start our savings plan by declaring over 50% of our spending off-limits, we are either looking at HUGE cuts in the remaining not-quite 50% or we’re going to fail before we’ve even started.<\/p>\n
We could abolish entire departments — say HUD, EPA, NASA, Education, and Labor — and eliminate all foreign aid and only reduce our total federal spending by 9%. Now 9% of 3.4 trillion dollars is still a lot of money (although an interesting academic experiment is to get a group of people together and discuss what you’ll cut in the federal budget. You\u00a0may find yourself saying, with all seriousness, that we’re only looking at ten million dollars. It isn’t worth the time we’re taking to discuss it.). \u00a0But we could reduce Health & Human Services, Social Security, and Defense by 3% each and save the same 9%.<\/p>\n
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