The Redhunter

How do we stop it Tom? This isn't meant to eb a smart alecky reply because I agree 100% that this is a huge problem. What do we cut that everyone can agree upon? Cut Social Security if you dare. Close military bases. I dare you.

We all have our hands in the till. I'm willing to pay more taxes. Not many others are though. But they still want the goodies government borrows money so it can hand out.

This is going to grow until the inevitable coming of United States bankruptcy. Then, as usual, the people that loved government handouts they didn't have to pay taxes to get will complain that somebody should have done something years ago.

I'm a cynical liberal. You have to appreciate the irony. Or I've been reading your excellent blog too long.

Thank you for your kind words, Truth. I remember the first post of yours I saw was one in which you supported Israel in it's war with Hamas and I said this fellow may be a lib but he's got moral clarity on a very important issue.

As for stopping the deficit, sigh, I share your frustration. It's easy to complain but hard to fix.

And I'm not reflexively opposed to taxes. Nor am I a paleoconservative who wants to eliminate 2/3 of the federal government.

A few thoughts on reducing the deficit:

The first thing is to put a brake on federal money to the states. If a state wants money for a bridge let them raise taxes on their own citizens and pay for it themselves.

No more tax increases. Again, I'm not a paleo, but the only way to control spending is to put a brake on the funding mechanism.

Outlaw earmarks

Freeze what they call "discretionary spending" for a few years at least.

End corporate welfare

For more, Heritage has some pretty good ideas

- In the end, though, it's going to take political willpower. Either we elect people who will take these steps or we won't.

One reason that a lot of conservatives didn't turn out for the 2008 Election was the spending issue. McCain was problematic in that regard too.

Here is the crux of the problem:

"...it's going to take political willpower. Either we elect people who will take these steps or we won't."

It is not just the willpower of politicians (who are all too easy to blame), but also of the electorate. The reality is that voters reward politicians who bring home the bacon. I doubt Sen. Dodd (D) voted for the F-22 for any other reason except for the fact that the program created many jobs in his home state, and people in his state like benefiting from federal spending. It is rare that politicians support base closures, elimination of projects, or reduced funding that cause job loses for their electorate.

My pessimistic view is that we voters tend to have a credit card mentality. We want the benefits of increased defense spending, functional roads, bridges that don’t collapse, a banking system that ensures the money you put in your savings account is FDIC insured, border guards who can control our long border with Mexico, etc.

The budget crisis in California is a prime example of this have it now, pay later attitude. While libertarians like to blame the politicians in California (a very polarized state), the reality is that the voter initiative process in California is out of control. When asked on the ballot, voters in California have consistently supported measures that mandate increases in spending for things like minimum prison sentences, increased park land acquisition, seismic retrofits of the water supply infrastructure, required student teacher ratios, etc. This “ballot box budgeting” (see this excellent article in The Economist) ensures that the voters get to ask for services, and also get to decline to pay for them. Voters in California have shown themselves as a microcosm of the wider public attitude: I want it now, send the bill to the next generation.

Tom, the challenge with the Heritage ideas is that they are fine for some think tank to promote, but they are political suicide or not based in reality. Reform entitlements? This is a euphemism for reducing social security and Medicare (not to mention veteran’s benefits). No politician wants to anger the voting block with the highest voter turnout (the AARP). A great idea for a bunch of lobbyists who don’t have to answer to angry voters, but not very likely in the real world.

Another of their ideas is to reduce "Increasing spending through accounting gimmicks." At least Obama included the war in Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget. Bush used to fund them through "emergency supplemental spending", making it look like we passed a smaller budget, even though we all knew these to be expected costs, and then they showed up later in the fiscal year, as "emergency" expenses.

This was a real side splitter:
"Privatize federal corporations by offering current public employees stock options at below-market prices"

-- So they suggest privatizing the federal corporations such as the FDIC and FSLIC because the banking industry does such a good job of regulating themselves? What are they smoking over there? We just had massive financial crisis, thanks in part to inadequate regulation of the financial sector, so we are going to privatize the very entities set up to regulate and backstop the financial industry? That is just insane!!!

I find it interesting that we are 'concerned' at the rate by which Obama is increasing the deficit and yet one of the reasons we perceive his obvious "spending recklessness" is due to the fact that his budget projections includes just about everything: No accounting gimmicks other than a real optomistic level of growth.

Everyone has their own ideas of how to balance the budget and it always seems to involve protecting their pet interests. What we need to do is have a debate over concepts: What do we mean when we claim that we want a 'strong defense" or what is meant by "healthcare reform" so on and so forth.

I am all for a strong defense and for healthcare reform. I just do not understand how a strong defense means supporting our folly in Iraq when our borders are wide open and our ports of entry are easy targets.

I do not think that healthcare reform is all about insuring the uninsured but rather is about increasing your return on your investment. We need to focus on decreasing costs, improving efficencies and effectiveness of our healthcare system and improving the return on the amount of money that we already spend on healthcare rather than attempting to establish means to increase our potential for more expenses in the future.

jason - thank you for your excellent comments. No doubt the voter initiative process is out of control in California. I don't support all of the ideas in that Heritage report but disagree and think it is a good start and many ideas are good. What it will take is an electorate willing to vote people into office who will do some of them.

But with all due respect what you're forgetting is that the point of this post was that Obama has made a bad situation worse by accelerating the deficit. He didn't have to pass the stimulus, it wasn't part of any "natural growth" of the budget.

TAO - thank you also for stopping by. Obamacare is about a lot of things, but controlling costs isn't one of them. Surely you haven't missed the CBO reports that put the lie to that claim?