Whether I'm a Conservative or Libertarian I GUESS comes down to how I answer this question: "Cut taxes and government spending by 50% or more." Cut what govt spending? All of it across the board? That'd mean cutting the interest pmts on the nat'l debt by 50%. How ya gunna do THAT w/o hanging the country out to dry?
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At least when I answered the question, my response was aspirational.
According to The Fiscal Times in a July 24, 2013 article by Jacqueline Leo the federal government is wasting more money than we think. According to figures that they meticulously compiled agency by agency, they estimated that the government wasted $788,595,076,947. Eliminate functional and departmental duplication and you can probably double that.
The plain facts are that if we were just able to cut our waste by half we wouldn’t need the sequester. In fact, at about a saving of $400 billion we could eliminate the entire sequester in three years and then start working on the national debt. The deficit would shrink to a balanced budget in less than two years. Yet, we can’t seem to pull it off.
Politicians of all stripes campaign on the promise to curb waste, fraud and abuse. Election cycle after election cycle the voters hear this broken record of broken promises. Yet, nothing seems to happen. The bureaucracy is careful to protect itself.
But as a smiling army medic once told me, "don't worry, the bleeding always stops... one way or another". At the time his humor didn't seem particularly comforting.
CBO projects that by 2025, every penny of the federal budget will go to interest on the debt as well as spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. We're screwed either way but "don't worry, the bleeding always stops... one way or another".
