Al, I completely agree...you might have noticed that I have advocated for these tax cuts to be rescinded...income and payroll...if not immediately, then gradually....so you are mis-characterizing my positions. I have also explicitly said that funds from cutting the military budget ought to be re-routed to domestic programs like SS, infrastructure, health care.
So essentially you're in favor of jumping off the fiscal cliff, or at least going off of it with some sort of parachute.
The funny thing is that the fiscal cliff will have no effect on Social Security and Medicaid. Medicare will only be affected by the drop-off in payments to physicians, but the promised benefits to Medicare recipients will be untouched.
Federal pay and veterans' benefits will also be untouched.
Defense and other federal agencies will have their budgets sequestered, but that might actually be a good thing. You and I both want defense spending to go down, and a lot of stupid pork barrel projects will have to be cut.
Even then, the total amount of spending cuts will only be $100 billion. The other $400 billion (or whatever) will have to come through tax increases, e.g. the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the Obama tax holiday, the extra ObamaCare taxes, etc. No problem, right? Except that this could trigger another recession, which no one really wants.
Tenchusatsu |
