In a thread titled "Romney to kill Big Bird" I'm not sure you can avoid a political conclusion, but I was trying more to focus thought on the topic to a larger context than simply "I like/dislike PBS and therefore care/don't care if funding is cut."
The question the next President has to face is how to get the deficit under control. Particularly if (as has happened before) Congress is not, shall we say, equally committed to the same agenda.
The President (whoever they are) can promise all kinds of things, but all they can ACTUALLY do is introduce the idea to Congress and lobby for it. I suppose they can also veto things that don't follow his plan as well.
Seems to me that the real solution involves electing a President and supermajority in Congress that agree on a plan.
I would love to hear from both political parties on how they are actually going to tackle cutting the parts of the budget that make up the vast majority of the spending. We've already established that cutting taxes for the rich doesn't work -- we tried it (we're still trying it in fact), and that hasn't solved the problem. So clearly we need another solution, one that involves actually cutting entitlements and defense, which together make up 62 percent of the budget.
There are only two ways to entitlements: switch to a system that keeps benefits about the same, but lowers the costs of the program; or raise revenues. You're not going to realistically take Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid away (together making up 43 percent of the budget).
In my opinion, there's a LOT of fat that could be cut from defense, and a LOT of savings that could be gained from switching to single-payer healthcare (please hold down your screams of "socialist!"). I sincerely believe the military could do its job on a "mere" $500B a year (down from the current $700B), and single-payer (or if you prefer, "put everyone on Medicare") would cut out $244B of the current $835B spent annually.*
*source on that last bit:
Funding a National Single-Payer System | Physicians for a National Health Program
So if (I know it's a big if) we could "find" $200B in military reductions (or, as the joke goes, get by without a dozen new fighter jets each year) and $244B in just the medical side of entitlements (not sure we can save a lot in SS, but we can easily "fix" SS -- but I'll save that for another post), you have $444B in ANNUAL savings with, IMO, no significant loss of benefit or service in either area (and in fact substantial improvement in some areas).
Now that's only about 12 percent or so of the total outlay the government spends each year, but imagine if you could put 12 percent of everything you earn, tax-free, into a retirement fund: most of you would be doing pretty well pretty quick. To put it another way: if, in a fantasy world that will never exist, we used that money to pay off the debt (not the deficit, the
national debt), it would be paid off in as little as 20 years. If you think the amount I just cut out of the budget is impressive, wait till you see how much money we'll save on interest by paying down that debt ...
