Well Said, Bernie Sanders!

[G-Man]

Call me angry even though I've yet to say an angry word, and then come back and pretend you want to have a fair and open discussion. Good one Jonathan.

What it boils down to is that I'm sick of demagoguery, a LOT of it coming from the Democrat side, instead of any effort to push forward real solutions. The three items that Bernie Sanders targeted in his quote are things that poll GREAT. Two unpopular wars, the greedy rich, those reckless high-rolling wall streeters... It doesn't take any courage to speak out and get all indignant about those three things because they're already unpopular and make easy targets. And it's demagoguery because getting rid of the war spending and taxing the "rich" (whoever that is, the definition changes depending on who the democrats are talking to) makes a great rally cry but would barely put a dent in this insane deficit. Being a "stand up" guy would be actually STANDING UP for something, saying something that's not very popular to say but needs to be said. If he had included those three things along with serious entitlement reform and dramatic across-the-board cuts on ALL programs, then he wouldn't be a demagogue. He'd be a stand up guy trying to make a difference.

And as for my main targets being Congress and that being an "easy and unpopular" target... Congress seems like the perfect target to me. After all, Congress makes the budget and we are talking about the budget deficit.

What would I support cutting or taxing? I wouldn't support taxing anything. Not because I feel sorry for the rich or don't think that corporations could handle paying a bit more but because revenue is not the problem - spending is. You give the government an extra trillion dollars and by next year, that trillion is going to be a permanent part of the budget. They'll find a way to take that extra trillion as a baseline and demand even more money on top of it next year. What needs to be cut is spending - all across the board, no exceptions. Just like with a family that suddenly finds itself unemployed, things that aren't absolutely critical should be slashed to the bone and everything else should have a flat 10 percent taken off the top. The different government agencies will have to find a way to make do with less - cut salaries, be more efficient, etc. It sounds dramatic but if you don't do it now, you'll have to do it anyway in the future once the borrowed money runs out.

But nothing like that's ever going to happen as long as a politician can just point fingers and people will cheer him on, content to believe that someone else can pay the price, that no difficult decisions need to be made.

[andy3000]

Instead of arguing what the government SHOULD do, everyone should stop take a breath and consider what it WILL do. Most likely the same idiotic policies that got us where we are today will continue until the dollar collapses at which point the world economy (not just USA, the dollar is the world reserve currency) will also collapse. Both parties grow the size of government, and have no interest in stopping. Wikipedia says that Federal Government spending is 39.97 percent of GDP, that is insane. Government spending - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Does anyone think spending will be cut by an amount that will make any difference? What happens when all the baby boomers retire and tax revenues take another nose dive?

Also, consider that the US government is the largest organization on the planet but is unable to solve any of the problems it has taken on. Yet we are constantly told the solution is more government.

[Jonathan Whatley]

G-Man:

Maybe I misread your tone, which is easy to do on the Internet. I'm sorry if I did.

What needs to be cut is spending - all across the board, no exceptions. Just like with a family that suddenly finds itself unemployed, things that aren't absolutely critical should be slashed to the bone and everything else should have a flat 10 percent taken off the top. The different government agencies will have to find a way to make do with less - cut salaries, be more efficient, etc. It sounds dramatic but if you don't do it now, you'll have to do it anyway in the future once the borrowed money runs out.

And that's a substantive platform, and a net 10% spending cut overall would improve the deficit situation.

I think serious problems would come up implementing such a thing in practice.

Can we really expect to cut 10% from the budget of the IRS without losing more in turn in tax revenues from reduced enforcement?

How would we cut 10% from the budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons? With how many prisoner furloughs, with how much of a cut in staff to prisoner ratios, with how much of a cut in salary and benefits to staff who have families to look out for and other things they could be do with their lives too?

If we implemented a 10% cut in their salary and benefits, it probably wouldn't be surprising if we very quickly lost the majority of, say, physicians and nurses in the Public Health Service, the Indian Health Service, the Bureau of Prisons, in the military without enlistment term commitment, etc. The remainder would include some who were wonderful idealists. Also a number of duds, out of proportion to their number in the previous population.

We could see what we could do to fill the emptied slots with suddenly substantially lower-paid positions in a very competitive market for doctors and nurses. We could try to contract the work out to locums. I think we'd struggle, at best, for locum physicians and nurses for 10% less than current federal public service full-time career salary and benefit costs.

Can we cut 10% out of every corporal's pay stub? 10% out of every MRE?

Or would we leave a very quickly large list of things untouched or much less touched, then have to go out and find other things in the same departmental budgets to lop off further?

Then it's going to cut a lot more than 10% in those functions, and hurt those functions a lot more than the idea of a 10% "across-the-board" cut conveys.

Yes, there are easier examples than this where the system can absorb x% cuts more easily, I don't doubt. This seems to be a thoughtful and nonpartisan overview of the strategy: The 5% Solution: The Dreaded “Across the Board” Cuts (John O'Leary, Governing, July 7, 2010)

And yes, there are big elephants where we could cut a lot more than 10% within some budget lines leaving us a lot more room to let others off. (Though you ruled out letting anything off, saying you'd take 10% even off of essentials.)

Still. I'm not saying you're being a demagogue or any of this here, but I think we've seen across-the-board cuts used in an outwardly appealing but ultimately cheap, trite, and impractical way.

I lived in Ontario, Canada in 1995 when a hard-right conservative, for Canada, provincial government was elected. They promised an across-the-board spending cuts on almost everything. One of the only exceptions was "classroom spending" in education.

Then they released a funding formula for schools that didn't count, IIRC from what I read at the time, hallways as classroom space.

So any spending attributable to school hallways goes into the universe for the across-the-board cut.

Can you shrink hallway space in existing facilities? Almost never. Can you scale, say, a 10% cut on lighting and heating and cleaning and maintenance for hallways and principal's offices and stockrooms and all that, practically, to every school? Even your older, draftier schools in a place that gets very cold in winter and where the capital budget for major retrofits or new school buildings sure isn't close at hand either?

Sure, you can privatize some things or get public-private partnerships or pay consultants for the savings they can find. But how much are they really going to do to save 10% off lighting, heating, cleaning and maintaining non-classroom school spaces even inclusive of their own fees?

At least public schools in Ontario weren't at the breaking point of many elsewhere, and could absorb all sorts of lurching around from crisis to crisis with this and school bus routes and school board amalgamation and so on for a couple terms of conservative government.

But some important, core public services in the U.S. seem to be pared to the bone already. And a death by small cuts is still a death.

[Jonathan Whatley]

What needs to be cut is spending - all across the board, no exceptions. Just like with a family that suddenly finds itself unemployed, things that aren't absolutely critical should be slashed to the bone and everything else should have a flat 10 percent taken off the top.

10% off family medical expenses? 10% off housing? 10% off auto fuel spending? 10% off auto maintenance? No exceptions? Even if your daughter is sick, or you're in one of the thriftiest apartments short of something dangerous already, or you barely use the car for anything but looking for work in an area with severely limited or no public transit service, or the car you're using to look for work proceeds to conk out?

A family that was spending heavily enough to start with may be able to absorb an across-the-board cut in many areas, reasonably well.

But beyond a certain point, the only way you're going to save money with a truly "across-the-board, no exceptions" spending cut on your family is when your family leaves you. And there can be some consequences after this that could be much less conducive to spending cuts in turn. :p

[andy3000]

To cut expenses by 10 percent in an agency a person could cut item by item until it reached 10 percent. In other words let a few people go, not cut salaries.

[Lindagerr]

What needs to be cut is not the salaries of the rank and file but the salaries of the executives. Yes I have friends in executive positions and i hear them talk about how they have had to cut back, they have a different idea of what cutting back means. Maybe instead of spending $1000 on eating out this month they will cut back to $750. When I was telling a friend that while my husband was out of work we tried to make ends meet on $2200 a month ( That is little more then a 2 bedroom Apartment rents for around here) with 4 adults in the house and not one of us had a job they were shocked. Someone nearby a better off financially person, said $2200 a month I spend that in a day. We all have to cut back but across the board doesn't work. My brother has disabilities and can no longer hold a job. He has lost his home phone, his car and has to go to a food pantry for food. He gets his medical care from the VA (Service stinks is slow and difficult to get) I pay for his cell phone he gets minimal minutes on my plan and he keeps his heat at 62 degrees during the day so he can make the oil last longer. Where do you propose he find the 10% to cut back. Oh he also does not have TV or internet. Even where he can take Public transportation it is expensive. If I want to go get him (like for Thanksgiving) it is a 4 hr trip to go get him and bring him home. There is not any public transportation that comes here from there.

You can cut spending by congress, but if we cut out the waste and made government defend their spending like the rest of us do we might just have something that works.

[ryoder]

The difference between us and congress is that we cannot simply increase our "revenues" by forcing others to pay us more of the money they earned. What tax rate is considered off the table? 90% 99%?
Rich people pay more than their fair share of taxes. Obama pays more in taxes per year than most of us will pay in a lifetime. He is rich. Don't ask him to pay more because if he does, he will spend less on other areas or find a way to invest it in foreign lands that are more tax friendly.

[G-Man]

Linda, your story is a perfect illustration of what I'm talking about. When an individual family like your own finds itself with less, it finds a way to make do. I'm not talking about asking the government to make do with 50 or 75 percent less like you did; I'm just talking about ten percent. But the federal government is like the executive making 500k/year groaning about how hard it is having to live with 10 percent less earnings this year due to bad stock performance. No matter how much money it has, it NEVER has enough.

Jonathan, I don't know nearly enough nor do I think it's realistic for me to even try to give you specifics on how each agency would handle 10 percent cuts, but like the article you pointed to said, there are a lot of reasons across-the-board cuts are an attractive option. In my mind, it's the only way you can have significant cuts with a chance of success because you're not picking any favorites - every agency is getting the same treatment. If you tried to prioritize agencies and cut a little here, a lot there, then Congress would just get bogged down in argument and in the end, little or nothing would get cut.

That being said, I find it hard to believe that there aren't some low-hanging fruit that you can slash to the bone. When you're an individual family in extreme hardship, your priorities are going to be food, security, and shelter - the fundamentals. Everything else becomes a luxury.

I also find it hard to believe that government agencies are running so efficiently that they couldn't find 10 percent to cut if their backs were to the wall. With unemployment/underemployment at 20 or 25 percent, are you telling me everyone in the government is going to leave their job because of a 10 percent paycut? If so, there should be plenty of hungry workers out there clamoring to take their place. That's the beauty of the free job market; salaries should go up and down depending on supply and demand, and right now, there's a huge supply of people looking for work. This may not be true for some of the professions you referenced, but hey, no broad plan like this is going to be perfect.

And I shouldn't have to point out that sinking more money into something doesn't equate to better performance. Just look at GM vs Ford, or USPS vs UPS...

[Jonathan Whatley]

The federal government shutdown reminds me of this thread where we got to debating a 10% "across-the-board" government spending cut. I think some of the problems we're seeing with the government shutdown are problems we'd also see in an across-the-board spending cut – and the government shutdown is not absolutely across-the-board.

If anyone is still around who supports an absolutely across-the-board spending cut, would it include national monuments to veterans? Look how badly closing the gates at national monuments went within less than one day. Would we cut 10% from national cemeteries? They're partially exempt from sequestration, partially not. Arlington National Cemetery is operating but expects to perform about 160 fewer funerals per month. (This is the rate. I badly hope this doesn't go on a month.)

It seems veterans won't be turned away but funerals will be delayed. With a truly "across-the-board" spending cut the morgue, now dealing with an overflow of caskets in queue, will probably be told to do its job for less than it had even before the overflow.

I can live in a world with with across-the-board spending cuts that are either widely across-the-board but very small (1% each from every county department), or larger but targeted to non-core services (10% across every branch of the tourist promotion department). Though I'll usually still oppose these cuts.

But if two days temporary furlough from a targeted list of federal government functions is creating the mess we see already, cuts of 10% to every federal agency "no exception" would be intolerable. The incidence of the cuts isn't exactly the same but they're close enough that the shutdown is instructive, a lesson in how not to run a great country. Which, a great country, we are.

[UptonSinclair]

Without a major change to our Medical system in the United States, entitlements will eat up a big part of the budget because medical inflation is unsustainable.

Also, when discussing the budget deficit it is important to remember that tax revenues as a portion of GDP are at low levels not seen since the 50's.