Let me make one thing abundantly clear. I am not a mathematician. But I can't help but think that my math skills start looking pretty awesome when compared to all the idiots on Capitol Hill debating the budget.
Take a look at this info-graphic:
So let me get this straight. We have a budget of $3.7 trillion. $1.6 trillion of this budget is money that we don't have. We are currently hearing about $62 billion in proposed budget cuts by the GOP. The Democrats think that will sink our economy and that we can't cut that much. We are talking about less than 4% of our ANNUAL DEFICIT here.
Even more interesting, a new report has surfaced that analyzes duplicate/overlapping spending by government entities that have the same mandate. If you haven't read the paper lately, you can catch up here:
So we are stuck with a massive deficit that totals somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.6 Trillion dollars this year. Referring to the budget info-graphic again, there are a number of likely candidates for reform, but no one wants to talk about the only ones that would make a dent in this annual debt (Besides eliminating our debt and saving half a trillion in interest every year).
I'm talking about Social Security ($1.11 trillion) and Medicaid/Medicare ($0.8 Trillion). These 2 programs being phased out or completely cut would save the $1.6 trillion we need to save, in addition to leaving a nice $300 billion dollar surplus to start paying back our debts. Supposing we could save another $200 billion dollars on duplicate programs, we might even be out of debt within 28 YEARS. Yes, you heard me right. Even after completely doing away with entitlement programs, it would take nearly 3 decades to pull ourselves out of this gaping hole that we like to blithely refer to as our national debt. (Couldn't we at least capitalize that or something? Mandated italics just for the word NATIONAL DEBT?)
I have little hope that Social Security will survive to pay me more than the cost of lunch by the time I retire. Medical Coverage just got "fixed" by Obama, but we can all agree that there is a problem with the way Medicine and insurance is run in this country - (I say we eliminate insurance and make the doctors compete in a free market for your business!)
Regardless of your thoughts on these programs, you have to agree that something must be done to stop the fiscal hemorrhaging. I don't care who you are or what you believe in, at the end of the day cutting $62 billion dollars to make up a $1.6 trillion dollar annual deficit not only helps no one, but makes the assumption that general math skills in America hold the highest deficit of all.
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