Americans for Prosperity Launch a Cut Spending Now Campaign

Comment

Comment by carol ann parisi on March 25, 2011 at 7:45am

  

CUT SPENDING NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

"No cuts will be required in Social Security or Medicare and no tax increases will be necessary. . . or tolerated! The first thing to do is to roll back the huge increase in discretionary nondefense spending with which Obama has saddled our country. Drop it back down to pre-Obama levels."

Here are some excerpts from the feature:

Admitting that the federal budget is wildly out of control? Not hard to do, especially after the shellacking the voters delivered to Washington last fall.

Actually making the cuts that will fix the problem? That's hard.

Indeed, that broad agreement disintegrated into partisan clashes the moment members of Congress sat down to write a budget for the rest of the year.

Look no further than the White House. President Obama speaks of the need to "free ourselves from the burden of historic deficits and growing debt." Yet he delivered a budget starkly at odds with that goal. One wonders how badly the situation will have to get for the nation to get real leadership. Only the House of Representatives has proved willing and able to begin the necessary course correction to prevent fiscal disaster.

 

Two questions arise: Which cuts are possible, and which cuts are necessary?

The budget facts are irrefutable. Fiscally speaking, we’re hemorrhaging. Between 2008 and 2010, total federal spending grew $474 billion, or 16 percent. Over half of that spending was on entitlements -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- and interest on the debt. In 2010, the deficit was $1.3 trillion, the second highest in dollar terms. Publicly held debt soared to $9 trillion. By the end of this year, we'll still be borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar. Better be nice to China!

And that's the good news.

While today's spending is unaffordable, tomorrow's is unsustainable.

Entitlement spending is set to explode as baby boomers flood into the programs. It really starts in earnest this year when the first boomers begin getting Medicare. This tsunami of spending is so massive that, in less than two generations, it will claim all taxes. It will drive total federal spending from its historic average of 20 percent of the economy to nearly 40 percent. Deficits nearly as large as the entire federal budget today would drive the debt to 370 percent of the economy by 2052 (see Chart 1: National Debt Set to Skyrocket).

Even eliminating all other spending, from earmarks to defense, wouldn't solve our long-term budget problem. The simple but painful fact is that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid must be fundamentally altered if they are to continue. To pay for them as they are today would mean taxes must soar.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, every income tax rate would have to double and continually increase, reaching 25 percent for the lowest income and 88% for the highest (see Chart 2: Pa