- Joined
- Mar 21, 2005
- Messages
- 25,893
- Reaction score
- 12,484
- Location
- New York, NY
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Slightly Conservative
I agree. And your numbers show the root cause of the problem. Let's take a deeper look.
Cutting Medicaid brings about a hissy fit from the over 65 crowd. They are the most vocal group in America. And they fund the AARP, the most powerful lobbyist organization in America. So how does a politician cut Medicaid? They don't if they want to keep their jobs.
That doesn't really reflect on whether it would be good policy in the abstract, which is what I was getting at. As I noted, almost none of this is likely to be cut in the short term.
Despite the conventional wisdom that Medicaid/Medicare are untouchable, they will become very touchable over the next 8-15 years when they start dragging ever-increasing amounts of money from the general budget.
Welfare. We spent about 4 years under Clinton and a GOP Congress cutting the welfare rolls (remember welfare to work?) and most people will tell you it's now harder to cut any more. Even the GOP couldn't make deeper cuts when they had control of both houses for 6 years.
Much like they couldn't make cuts to Medicare/aid. Everything is possible, it's just a question of political feasibility.
Social Security. Completely untouchable and you know that. The AARP will rip the head off of any politician that goes near it. Even Bush and the GOP got slapped when they tried to privatize a tiny percentage of it.
See above.
DOD. Again almost untouchable for the GOP and the Dems. We have such a macho "John Wayne" mentality in America about our military that anyone who cuts defense spending is considered a wimp.
See above.
So where does that leave us? You don't want to cut DOD spending, but no one else wants to cut anything else either. And that's the root of the problem. Everyone has an excuse for not cutting spending. Yours is that cutting DOD spending won't amount to much.
Where did I say I don't want to cut DoD spending? I do want to cut DoD spending - I'm simply noting that even with that, we won't be doing a damn to fix the real problems that we're facing.