Lately, I've been feeling like a coal miner in the days of old. I live in a generation being saddled with many
trillions in debt piled up by the generations before me. Some was reasonable, like recovery after the Great Depression, World War II, etc. I can appreciate much of our current spending. But as we've seen in the last weeks, our finances are unsustainable. We can't keep
spending more than we tax.
This is where I see myself as more conservative than a liberal, but FAR more liberal than a conservative. I have no issue attaching the label "tax and spend" to myself, as I strongly support social welfare programs and higher taxation, plus I kinda thought "tax and spend" is the basic job of government. "Reallocation of wealth" and "socialism" don't scare me in the least, even if some of the wealth will be redistributed away from me.
Right now, I don't understand why we can't tax someone's two-hundred-fifty-first thousand dollars of taxable income. First,
not all income is taxable, so with deductions, the number is
closer to an actual income of $300k to hit $250k in taxable. Second, only the amount OVER the cap is taxed at a higher rate. Taxing at a flat rate means giving everyone a one percent tax increase, while you could give the richest one percent of the population a two percent increase and leave everyone else alone to the same net effect. How Fox News has managed to convince middle- and lower-class Americans to
defend tax breaks to effectively hurt themselves continues to boggle my mind. I know plenty of people who earn well over $250k who would be fine paying a little more tax if they knew our nation was helping those in need and balanced fiscally. If they made an extra thousand, they'd save it. If someone making $30k/year keeps more of their income, they'll be spending it on food, services, clothing and other essentials, which will create jobs. Trickle
up, I'd say. Henry Ford
paid his employees more because he knew he'd build a bigger customer base for his cars. Now, with increasing income inequality, we need to realize you need a certain amount to live on, and those making a high power of ten more can contribute more to our communal services.
Oh yeah, and we should tax corporations more as we have one of the lowest
effective corporate tax rates in the world. Don't care what the rates are, it's the deductions and benefits they get that brings their burden down. Close those damn loopholes.
That's not to say I love everything the Democrats bring to the table. We need to cut expenditures on entitlements. That's where the money is. We need to
raise the retirement age, as people are living longer and pulling out of the pot for longer. If you are nice and healthy for longer, you should still be working. Yeah, I know, we've built a nice dream of living in a cottage, sipping iced tea by the waterfront with not a care in the world at age 65. Give it up. So you were promised money early. I've been promised a country. So please, liberals, let the old folk work some more and retire later. Then we can minimize actual benefit cuts. This will be much more efficient than
readjusting how we calculate inflation, given that
we haven't given beneficiaries COLAs in the last few years anyway.
Both parties are wrong on defense. We need to cut it more. There is more to do. I live in CT, and I know about how many jobs defense pork makes. We have the
Groton Sub Base, GE,
United Technologies (including
Sikorsky Aircraft,
Hamilton Sundstrand and
Pratt & Whitney)... Hell, we were home to
Eli Whitney, legendary in the history of the American military-industrial complex. Our representatives worked hard to save defense items like the
F-22, the
second Joint Strike Fighter engine and the
sub base. We need to realize, though, that if we want to have any government, we need to cut back where we don't need it, even if we lose a few jobs. Granted, this isn't the right time for it at all, while the private sector stagnates and most job growth is public. But if we want to make this a fight right now, this has to be on the table.
Cutting social programs, like unemployment benefits, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($466 million), Planned Parenthood (about $70 million of a $1.1 billion budget), the National Endowment for the Arts ($161 million), education ($49.697 billion) or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ($8.132 billion to food assistance programs) is a ridiculous call. A miniscule fraction of our budget (of a total $1.415 trillion) goes to these programs. (
Stats from here and
here) Again, the vast majority of our budget is Social Security, Medicare and Defense. Hacking away at everything else will have almost no effect on our budget, but it will have massive consequences for our society, even beyond those who directly benefit from these programs. I prefer living in a country where people aren't left unemployed, hungry, poor and without any way to seek help.
Foreign aid seems to be the bastard stepchild that no one likes, but never gets cut. Americans don't understand why we keep doing it. In reality, while the numbers look big, it's still not much of our budget. It
is a lot to many foreign countries. Even if it ends up with dictators or murderers, we need to at least
try to help people not starve to death or die of curable ailments. Anyway, most of the aid is essentially bribery to keep countries from killing each other or us. Why aren't Pakistan and India waging all-out war against each other? How do we win over the less oil rich nations of the Middle East?
No one is claiming we need all tax increases, but the right says we need all spending cuts. No. Certainly, a reasonable deal will have much more in the way of spending cuts than revenue increases, as there's practically no way to increase revenue enough to balance out the spending. Maybe something close to 75% spending cuts, 25% tax increases. Honestly, I'm just cranky that the
wacko Tea Party freshmen aren't ready to have an adult conversation about all of this.
For some good visualizations on how we spend, tax and make a budget work,
check out some of these infographics.
