(02-20-2011 11:21 PM)CountryRedHawk Wrote: While we are at it, can we please cut the defense department's budget, please.
This is one problem with the left. I've heard the mantra that it's "the wars" and "the Bush tax cuts" and "the defense budget" that are driving the defiict. Unfortunately, the deficit is so big that those are only minor contributors, at most. I favor some defense cuts, and have laid those out in prior posts, so no need to do so again. But thinking that defense cuts can make a signficant dent in the deficit is wrong; there just isn't that much money there any more.
If you assume no stimulative effect of the "Bush tax cuts" (so that you assume taxable income is unchanged by them, and the total effect is just the rate differential), and if you add that to the total cost of the two wars, you account for only about 25% of the deficit. The other 75% is something else, and that's where we need to make a dent.
And the total defense budget is only about half of the deficit amount, so that even if we spent zero on defense, we'd still have a bigger deficit than in any pre-2008 year.
The things you want to cut aren't the things that are driving the deficit.
For the record, I am extremely unimpressed with the republican effort. I'm beginning to think that neither party has any interest in doing what needs to be done. Couldn't we have at least STARTED with the Bowles-Simpson recommendations? Even though they didn't get the 14 votes that were the goal, they did get a supermajority of the committee.