This makes me want to donate money to every teabagging (invective of choice) that runs in 2014 and onward.
One of the reasons that spending can't be cut is because we have trillions tied up in overages on programs that can't be cut. Medicare/caid overruns alone would pay for entire DoD/DHS/DoE/NASA. But people don't want to have their FICA raised enough to pay for it (which would jump from the 12% range (of which they pay half) to the 27% range. Populist opinion is "raise taxes on the rich and very rich". This isn't a "very rich" people thing, it's a "300M people want a lifestyle (SS/Medicare/Medicaid/now-PPACA) but don't want to pay for it" thing. Go ahead and raise taxes--the people making that much will continue to find loopholes. But even if they didn't, it's basic math. The 100k people making $2M or more can't pay for the social services, national defense and infrastructure of 300M. As an example, 250k people earned $1,000,000 or more. People love to state how about 1200 didn't pay a penny in tax. But what they don't say is that the total of those incomes was $729B, or not even enough to fund the Medicare overrun if you taxed them 100%. Our DEFICIT is $1.6T with millionaires paying ~25% on average. If you taxed every millionaire 100%, you wouldn't cover 1/3 of the deficit.
This is one of the many reasons I am glad that PPACA was being blocked. Passing a horribly-constructed panacaea (no matter how good or bad the intent), that will not be easily able to be revoked when the costs are 8x the intake (like Medicare/Caid) is irresponsible and inappropriate. If you want people to have "affordable care", then do things that address care like a) more doctors and nurse practitioners, b) lower drug costs, c) no mandatory insurance, d) no preventative care in the emergency room, etc. I'd much rather have my taxes be raised for more doctors and clinics and shots for kids than to have my (now mandatory) insurance rates jacked up to pay some insurance company, with no net increase in care.
Even during the government "shutdown", SS is getting paid (even though it's not a break-even proposition anymore), Medicare/Caid are being funded (even though they're almost a trillion dollars PER YEAR overspent, or roughly what a decade of war cost), the interest on debt is being paid, etc. Poorly-thought out mandatory social programs are the largest outpouring of our government--triple what education, defense and science/research spending are combined.
I just found 144 representatives and 18 senators to donate to during the next campaign. All I've seen today is how "the Tea Party lost"/"should be arrested"/"wasted $24B dollars"--what happens in February when the debt ceiling is hit again? For that matter, why wasn't the compromised 2011 debt ceiling raise enough? Even after the "atom bomb" of sequestration, we're at the point of either raising the debt ceiling or "defaulting".
