I am not saying look at the small wasteful programs to the exclusion of the big programs.
I am saying you have to change the culture of Congress. If you do not look at the small wasteful programs, you leave the culture of spending by Congress alone. So I say you are not serious if you are going to leave the culture of spend in place.
I would make many small bills to cut spending. One could start by a bill to cut defense spending by 1%. Another to cut Social Security benefits by 1%. Not huge amounts, but I do not think you are going to get bigger cuts until the culture is changed. It is hard to say one can not cut defense by 1 %. The same with Social Security. Follow up with a bill to cut out PBS. Another bill to cut Planned Parenthood. I am not for cutting Planned Parenthood, but you have to force Congress to show where they stand. Congress has to understand it has to make choices.
Again if you are not willing to cut small programs, how are you going to cut the big programs? Your approach is that it is okay for the government to waste money. And with that approach you are going to get nothing.
So what do you do with people like Gunner? Let them die in the street? We already HAVE universal health care. It's just that we pay through the nose for it, because many people don't have insurance.
IMO, insurance _is_ the problem, not the answer. Health ins. is a sucking hole of a trap. Once you start sending them money you can't stop or you'll lose all you've sent in. Like this guys story:
I'm glad I had ins. last summer. yah? what happened. I ended up in the hospital and racked up a $40k bill, ins. paid it. oh? Got a deductible? yah, $5k. oh, how much does this policy cost you? ah, $9k per year for my wife and I. oh? For how many years you been paying in? 10 years. So you paid the ins. co. $90k plus a $5k deductible so they could pay a $35k bill? hhmmm, gotta keep paying or I'll lose the $55k they "owe" me! aahh huh..... Why should the ins. co. make money while the hospital loses out? Why not pay yourself and fire the ins. co. !!!
Here's my own story:
4 years ago I had CHF, racked up a $10k+ bill. As I was paying it off at their billing office the gal says don't you wish you had ins. to pay this? Why. If I had kept my ins. going from the place I used to work I would have paid in $24k, I'm paying this off with a 30% deduction for paying right away. I'd rather pay $7k in cash than send that co. $24k!
Let me point out once again that the economy of a sovereign nation that prints its own currency and whose debts are defined in that same currency is nothing like that of a household or a corporation. Mistakenly conflating them is what leads to most of the misunderstanding about the national debt, and deficit spending.
If you're talking about Ryan's plan, it's DOA. What he's trying to do is based on ideology, not on real economics. His Medicare program, for example, basically surrenders on the issue of controlling costs by shifting the burden of containing them to (future) seniors. And they've caught on.
The fundamental problem with cutting costs is that all of those programs provide jobs or other income to most of the congressional districts and constituencies in the country. You saw how Boehner squirmed and equivocated about knocking out the "second engine" for the single-engined F-35. The plant was in a district adjoining his, and he was under enormous pressure at home to support that boondoggle.
Multiply that by, say, 535, most of whom will fight and scream about cuts that affect their district, and you see the size of the problem.
It's not a hopeful situation. And that doesn't even account for the other financial interest, which is the lobbies that coerce Congress with election money.
So we have a non-starter for Medicare, and a nearly impenetrable wall of resistance for defense and infrastructure spending. Those are the two biggest cost problems we face. The present system of responsibilities and authorities probably can't touch either one. Anyone who tries will get his head handed to him.
Yeah, insurance definitely is a problem, or at least two problems. First, they have no significant incentive to control medical costs (they did, for a short time, when HMOs were just getting started, but that disappeared when managed care became the dominant form of insurance and it was no longer a competitive issue). Second, they cream a lot of money off the top of the whole system. Their supposedly "low" profits are a shell game.
But many people not having insurance is a bigger problem. The questions are, how should the insurance industry be organized so as to avoid the perverse incentives, and how can it be made it more efficient?
BTW, I had a $220,000 hospital bill a few years ago myself, which would have killed me if I didn't have good employer-provided insurance.
The way around this is to do it similar to the military base closures. Present a bill to Congress for a up or down vote on the amount. Not on specific programs. A 1% cut in defense spending. The Pentagon gets to choose how to accomplish it.
Yes, that works from time to time. That, and line-item vetoes. It requires a lot of public support, and very broad national support, but when push comes to shove, it can work.
I am not saying look at the small wasteful programs to the exclusion of the big programs.
I am saying you have to change the culture of Congress. If you do not look at the small wasteful programs, you leave the culture of spending by Congress alone. So I say you are not serious if you are going to leave the culture of spend in place.
I would make many small bills to cut spending. One could start by a bill to cut defense spending by 1%. Another to cut Social Security benefits by 1%. Not huge amounts, but I do not think you are going to get bigger cuts until the culture is changed. It is hard to say one can not cut defense by 1 %. The same with Social Security. Follow up with a bill to cut out PBS. Another bill to cut Planned Parenthood. I am not for cutting Planned Parenthood, but you have to force Congress to show where they stand. Congress has to understand it has to make choices.
Again if you are not willing to cut small programs, how are you going to cut the big programs? Your approach is that it is okay for the government to waste money. And with that approach you are going to get nothing.
Well, let's just say we're looking at this from very different angles. What I'm saying is that the trivial little things that you think can change the "culture" of Congress look to me like distractions they're jerking around in order to avoid confronting the real problems. And I don't think they're likely to change the culture of Congress. Every one will be a battle, and will take time. Meantime, the inflation in medical costs is so high that six months of health care inflation will wipe out any gains you can make from six years of battling over the little social/cultural wars over Planned Parenthood or PBS (actually, the CPB).
Focusing on the little things is an intentional distraction from the things Congress doesn't want to confront. Settling the little things won't help to change that. The big battles will still be there, and they will still be as resistant to political change. Wiping out a small portion of PP's funding -- and that's all the federal portion is, all of it devoted to things like pap smears, other cancer tests and birth control -- will show only that one side can beat the other side. That's not a cultural change. That's just a case of counting hands in Congress, with the political winds determining which side wins. They do that every day and the culture doesn't change.
Congress doesn't want to come to grips with the big costs because a lot of heads are going to roll in the process. I give Ryan credit for taking on some big issues, as mal-formed as his ideas may be. Health care is a monster and no one has ever confronted the cultural resistance to change with any real effort and risk, except for Obama. You may or may not like the result. I happen to think the result is a dog's breakfast, but I didn't expect it to pass at all, and passing *something* at least confronted the cultural resistance. That was the biggest cultural confrontation we've seen in Congress in many decades. That's the kind of thing that really raises the issue to a level of doing something, instead of avoidance and distraction.
They have to identify the big issues and get going on them now. The Health Care Affordability Act has to be revised so it can address costs in a big way. That battle isn't over, but until it's settled, we're just whistling Dixie with things like defunding PBS.
As I said one needs to change the culture of Congress. I see a bunch of short bills on cutting things out of the budget as a way to do that. May not work, but making Congressmen vote on things, gives them a record of being for or against cutting the costs of government. It may take six years to change the Senate, but the House is doable in two years. And senators might look at who is not getting re-elected and have second thoughts on voting to keep everything.
As I said one needs to change the culture of Congress. I see a bunch of short bills on cutting things out of the budget as a way to do that. May not work, but making Congressmen vote on things, gives them a record of being for or against cutting the costs of government. It may take six years to change the Senate, but the House is doable in two years. And senators might look at who is not getting re-elected and have second thoughts on voting to keep everything.
Well, we'll see how that works out. For decades, it has appeared to me that the "culture" of Congress is not something it makes through its own actions, but rather something that results from shifting tides in the electorate plus the pressures that result from accumulated non-action. You're saying that some small actions could change it. I find that unlikely.
Note that the things Roger has focused on are highly partisan, social conservative issues, not fundamental economic issues. Most people know that Planned Parenthood's federal funding cannot, by law, be used for abortions. But Roger has a thing about abortions that he's converted into antipathy toward Planned Parenthood, so he's taken this opportunity to express his social views by transferring them to something he can convince himself is an economic issue. Sooner or later, this misdirection will become apparent to the population as a whole.
That's the kind of self-deception with which we're plagued at the moment, and there's a whole string of such issues that social conservatives have lined up under the guise of cutting spending. As we've seen, they amount to, at most 2% of the budget. And that's including a vast number of such issues that haven't been brought up in this discussion.
I think your position is wishful thinking for several reasons. First, these are battleground issues, and making a decision on them one way or the other will not be convincing to anyone as economic advances. They will be new points of contention in the culture wars, and they won't go away no matter how the issues are decided.
Second, it will eventually sink in that the public has just been shell-gamed by Congress, spending that time on an economic non-issue. The consequences of inaction have a way of creeping into the public consciousness eventually, and as the costs of health care continue to rise, no matter how we're paying for them, I believe that the public will realize that Congress has just ducked the issue by creating a dust-up over unrelated social issues. Their game will expose itself sooner or later.
What Roger, and possibly you, are identifying as wasteful spending are not the symbols of waste that perhaps half of the country has in mind. Waste, to perhaps half of us, is $200 billion in Defense spending in preparation for fighting the Cold War of the 1960s, but spending it in 2011. Waste is a trillion spent fighting a war that nearly everyone realizes now was fought either for the wrong reasons or because of bad information.
That's real money, and real waste. Most of us like PBS, and see it as an essential force that works against commercial television from turning into a real, live version of "Network." We'll fight over it. It's a miniscule cost that does a lot of good. If you want a fight over it, you'll get it.
Likewise, most of the people I know will go to the mat with Roger over Planned Parenthood. (full disclosure: FWIW, a very close friend of mine was a regional director of it.) I know what they do, and what Roger is doing, and I know that he's too deep in the tank to be objective or sensible about it. So he'll get a fight over that one, too.
If Congress defunds these things, all they will have done is show that they're on the social conservative side of politics, not that they're serious about cutting the budget. And we'll all know it. Even you and Roger have to acknowledge what's really going on with those examples, and, even if they get cut, it will be a Pyrrhic victory for you and a huge distraction for the country, from a serious issue that needs attention. And even victories for the social conservatives will not help anyone win the budget battles. The really big ones tend to cut across the political spectrum.
So we'll see how this all goes. I think there is almost no chance that the "culture" of Congress is going to change in economic terms because of battles fought over trivial, non-economic, cultural issues.
Hey Roger, Send me your address and I'll send you the $1.35 that you spent in taxes on PBS this year, PROVIDED that you agree not to whine about public media again for the rest of the year.
Since I was opposed to the misguided and illegal invasion of Iraq, and you were a Bush enabler, please send me the amount of money I spent in taxes this year for continuing disability and medical payments for those brave Americans who were so gravely wounded in George's Folly.
I didn't say that. I said to tackle the big ones first. That's the priority.
Nothing will happen until there is an approaching crisis. That's when Congress may act. Or not. It depends on how many ideological loons are in there at the time.
While you're busy cutting programs that don't fit your ideology, how about calling for immediate defunding of the office of faith based initiatives? How about rescinding the tax-exampt status of ALL religious organizations? Of course, in the greater scheme of the federal budget, these items don't amount to a hill of beans, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
On a local basis, the property tax exemptions given to churches and their holdings would make a huuge difference. In my town, therer are dozens of "houses of worship" and each of them also owns one or more homes for their pastor / preist / rabbi / whatever. This takes a significant bite out of our ratables and should, in my opinion, be stopped.
To me, the problem is the people that think wasting a billion dollars here and there is insignificant, don't forget, a billion saved is a billion earned. Waste a hundred billion, pay back a hundred trillion.
If it is only a few cents per person, then by all means, let us eliminate that "few cents". "Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves."
I'd start with the question "Why is this the Business of the Federal Government?" Then go on with "Do you favor funding the other side, too?"
Nonsense. The big budget items aren't things you can nibble a few cents at a time. And you can take all the things you *can* nibble, add them up, and they'll amount to so little they get lost in the rounding.
The big items need serious solutions, or we get nowhere.
Meanwhile, insuring health care is eating us alive, while you're arguing over Big Bird and Head Start.
That's why I'm skeptical that we'll get anywhere. The politicians can make plenty of hay off of people like you and Roger, and avoid the big -- and politically costly -- issues that are running us into the ground.
So, as I said a few posts above here, in response to RogerN:
While you're busy cutting programs that don't fit your ideology, how about calling for immediate defunding of the office of faith based initiatives? How about rescinding the tax-exampt status of ALL religious organizations? Of course, in the greater scheme of the federal budget, these items don't amount to a hill of beans, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I have come to the conclusion that you do not want the budget cut. And this bit about large versus small items is just to provide a diversion. You say do not look at everything, and Congress will comply by not looking at anything.
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