Read every word of Bruce Bartlett’s explanation.
Bartlett goes into great detail on how “cutting spending” is a pipe dream — either because the kind of stuff that conservatives always tell you they want to get gone won’t do much to balance the budget or because there are not enough votes to get rid of it. He starts with showing how much control the President and Congress respectively have over spending and ends with busting the myths about how Reagan or Thatcher cut spending.
Many of those favoring budget cuts have ridiculous notions about how much of the budget can be cut without reducing services. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans generally believe that 50% of the budget is wasted. This suggests that they believe the federal budget could be cut in half without cutting anything important like Social Security benefits or national defense.
Just so people know the round numbers, total spending this year is about $3.6 trillion. At most, $200 billion of that represents stimulus spending, so even if there had been no stimulus bill and the economy had done as well as it has done, we would be looking at a $3.4 trillion budget.
Revenues are only about $2.1 trillion, so we would be looking at a substantial deficit even if the stimulus package was never enacted. Revenues would be even lower if Republicans had gotten their wish and the stimulus consisted entirely of tax cuts. How tax cuts would help people with no wages because they have no jobs or businesses with no profits to tax was never explained. But many right-wingers are convinced that tax cuts are the only appropriate governmental response no matter what the problem is.
Looking at last year’s budget, only 38% was classified as discretionary; that is, under Congress’s control through the appropriations process. All the rest was mandatory: entitlements and interest on the debt. Within the discretionary category, 54% went to national defense. Just $37.5 billion, 3.3% of the discretionary budget, went for international affairs including foreign aid. Over the years I have encountered many conservatives who thought that abolishing foreign aid was just about the only thing needed to balance the budget. Obviously, that’s nonsense.
Domestic discretionary spending amounted to $485 billion last year. With a deficit last year of $459 billion, we would have had to abolish virtually every single domestic program to have achieved budget balance. That means every penny spent on housing, education, agriculture, highway construction and maintenance, border patrols, air traffic control, the FBI, and every other thing one can think of outside of national defense, Social Security and Medicare.
This means that it is impossible to get control of spending without cutting entitlement programs. Many Republicans agree, but they never make any serious effort to do so. On the contrary, they defend entitlements when Democrats suggest cutting them. The Republican National Committee has run television ads opposing cuts in Medicare because Obama proposed using such cuts to fund health reform. Many demonstrators at right-wing tea parties were seen carrying signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.
Seriously, read the whole thing. Bartlett is quite right that the political will does not exist to cut spending on the levels that Republicans or their handlers keep pushing. Not even among their own. Because why would a Republican controlled Congress create structural deficits with every program they implemented — from tax cuts to Medicare Part D to their wars.
I still think that people have the government they want. There are just some people with pet peeves about particular programs. If a politician wanted to cut spending enough to actually balance the books, that politician would be shown the door and his party wiped out for a very long time. Who — really — will cut Medicare? And why not? This is a program with a broad approval across many voting constituencies. And constituencies that vote are not constituencies that pols are going to spend much time pissing off. Unless you are a progressive Democrat. There are folks who milk this cutting spending business because it is a stalking horse for “people I don’t like getting tax money”. But the folks doing the milking don’t do much to propose real spending cuts. Like the repubs who howl about earmarks, but who busily submit their lists and take all they can get. It is way past time to deal with the fact that people have what they want — and work at telling people that they have more of it if they pay for it. Which is not an argument you hear very often.