Tell me: How many Republicans want to cut the biggest budget killer, the military? Lower taxes and more bombs, that's a great way to balance the budget.
A considerably number, but not by as much as the current default law requires. Btw, medical subsidies is the biggest budget killer going away, as presumably everyone agrees, no? Another thing ballooning the deficit is our sluggish economy, cutting revenues and upping transfer payments obviously. And we have a problem there. Without a creditable way out of the box deficit wise, if the economy improves a bit with banks starting to lend more, that will increase the money supply (fractionalized banking), and all those Treasuries the government bought to replace the money supply removed when the banks stopped lending much, will need to be resold, and guess what? That is going to push up interest rates as the Treasury bond supply balloons, and quality concerns haunt these government debt instruments, which in turn will wound or kill the recovery in its crib (and itself push up the deficit even more as the cost of debt carry ratchets up).
We're trapped guys without a clear plan to clean up the fiscal books. This is not an ideological exercise, but rather a mathematical one. There is no escape.
The military investments seem to me to be the biggest budget killers. Considering we spend more money on our military than all the first world nations combined and we have more military bases than every country in the world put together. The problem with overspending on the military is history shows us that an overaggressive foreign policy makes us LESS safe and drags us into other wars(That become even bigger financial burdens) as a result of "blowback" as opposed to a foreign policy focused on securing our own boarders rather than interfering in foreign conflicts.
Like I said the answer going forward revolves around initiating a Short term stimulus to get unemployment down, create new jobs and get our economy moving AFTER we establish a long term debt reduction plan that includes big cuts to our military budget, reigning in entitlement spending(including reforming Medicaid/Medicare and increasing the age of social security) and increasing revenue.
