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Mike Lee, Republican Senator from Utah - Going for the Jugular: President Obama Doesn't Have to Choose to Cut Social Security Benefits
His proposal:
What do you think?
Looks like a pretty dishonest proposal from Senator Lee. The biggest line item on his list of things to cut is "unclassified" ($34 billion per month), which is another way of saying he hasn't actually come up with the cuts (unless he has cited them somewhere other than this chart). The second-biggest item is defense vendor payments ($32 billion per month). While I agree with Sen. Lee that this should be drastically scaled back, he knows perfectly well that there is virtually zero support for this in Congress. I mean, congresspeople scream bloody murder every time a commission tries to shut down military bases in their state or district...there is no way they're going to allow him to cut the funding for some of their biggest donors.
The third-biggest item is education ($19 billion per month). While I think that it's a valid opinion that the federal government shouldn't be involved in education and reasonable people can disagree on that point, I think it's much less valid to believe that we can suddenly eliminate all of that spending without giving the states time to adjust...and in August, of all months, when the school year is just about to begin. Furthermore, the entire annual budget of the Department of Education is only $71 billion, so I don't know where he thinks he's going to find enough education money to save $19 billion per month.
I stopped looking after those three items, because most of the other cuts he suggested were relatively small. I do find it very telling that all of his cuts come from the discretionary budget rather than entitlements, and that the one cut that I looked into was actually more than the total amount we spend on that item. To me this suggests that his proposal is merely a way to benefit politically (by trying to pose as the defender of social security) among people who don't know or care about budgetary details, rather than a serious proposal to balance the budget.
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