What are people thinking?
It is interesting to see so many of the same people calling for a “double dip” recession while at the same time railing against government spending. The US Government is spending $3.5Tn this year. Admittedly that’s $1.5Tn more than they have, but it’s quite a lot of money no matter how you look at it. Conservative, born-again deficit hawks (they were born-again the day Obama was elected) will tell you the solution is to cut taxes and let corporations trickle their wealth down on the bottom 99%, well over 20% of whom are unemployed or under-employed.
The Big Lie being told by the right is that we can solve our problems by cutting spending and (ROFL) lowering taxes. Let’s put lowering taxes over to the side and look at cutting spending. By far, our single biggest discretionary line item is Defense, at $782Bn a year. The sum total of all other discretionary spending is only $437Bn so cutting 100% of non-defense discretionary government spending would knock not even 1/3 off our $1.5Tn debt.
What exactly would be included if we make all or part of those $437Bn in cutbacks? Here’s a great chart from Wallstats on Death and Taxes, which I think every deficit hawk should buy the poster of (6 square feet) and put in their office with red lines through all the programs they can do without. Try it, it’s fun – see how much money you can save!
Of course, let’s keep in mind that the $1.5Tn the government spends directly employs 2.7M people and millions more indirectly so, for every person you cut, make sure you add back $20,000 a year for unemployment benefits and administration (or are we going to throw them all on the street?). So that’s, unfortunately, $20Bn spent for every million jobs you destroy. Gosh, this game gets complicated, doesn’t it? Here’s a nice chart you can throw darts at and see how many of these guys you can kick to the curb by Christmas because that’ll fix the economy, won’t it? Don’t worry, I’m sure none of them are your customers because surely you don’t deal with THOSE kind of people:
So we cut, for argument’s sake, 50% of our $437Bn discretionary budget and that leaves $1.1Tn to cut out of our $782Bn defense budget. Hmmm, tricky… I suppose we’re done with TARP in 2010 so there’s $150Bn gone but maybe we don’t want to default on our interest or other…
