The president released his budget for 2012 on Monday. It takes the federal deficit down from $1.6 trillion to $1.1 trillion U.S., still a huge amount of spending for the federal government.
The numbers break down this way: Just $90 billion U.S. in spending cuts and $453 billion U.S. in increased revenue, most generated by higher taxes on stuff.
The Republicans, of course, say the cuts are far too small, and "Talking Points" agrees.
Here's how the enormous spending affects you:
In order to pay off the interest on the $14-trillion U.S. debt, money that could be used to defend America, to educate its children and to build highways and other infrastructure is instead sent to people who have lent us money. People in China and in the Arab states for example. So the feds are basically taking money away from we the people and using it to satisfy debt payments.
It's a vicious cycle. The Democrats demand more money for education, entitlements and other projects. But we have to borrow to support those things because we are sending the money we do have to people who have financed our debt. So the debt gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
This is crazy. If the U.S. government were a business, it would have gone under a long time ago.
The solution is really a question: How much pain will we tolerate?
For example, "Talking Points" believes that Social Security payments will have to be cut to the wealthy and perhaps to working Americans in the form of a higher retirement age. Will you support that?
On the health care front, no longer can Medicare and Medicaid be doled out the way it is now. Much more discipline will have to be imposed. Are you OK with that? Chances are your co-payments will go up a lot, no matter what happens in the Supreme Court with Obamacare. There is simply no other way to save America economically.
President Obama believes that cutting the budget will buy the country time, and that's true to some extent. But the cold truth is America needs a drastic overhaul in what it spends money on and how many entitlements there should be.
If we are all in this together, we will absorb the pain. If we only care about ourselves, America will continue on the road towards insolvency. No question about it.
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