That brings us to a balanced budget, but still leaves us with 16+ Trillion in debt. SS Medicaid / Medicare will continue to grow exponentially on auto pilot if they are not down away with, so it would be a short term balance unless we cut those 3 programs.

We will never see a balanced budget again.

Timin203 on January 23, 2013 at 3:11 PM

There is actually a very simple to comprehend starting point. What many people do not understand is that MANY ‘add on programs’, like SCHIP(that costs more than 150 billion AFTER Obamacare), have been added to the medicaid budget over the last several decades.

A nice ‘clean’ way to clear up much of this spending is to eliminate EVERY government program that ‘assists’ ANYONE not in poverty! Currently, families in Cal that make $75k+ are on federal handout lists! All we accomplish with these subsidies is to increase prices which hurts BOTH the government AND the consumer.

You can’t have it both ways — we either count the t-bills that the SSA has in our “trust fund” as real debt for the government, or we concede that SS is totally broke. Either way, this debt has to be rolled over by treasury into real debt to the public (ahem federal reserve) or the money has to be borrowed from the public (ahem federal reserve) to cover current and future SS pay outs. So it’s definitely real, live, important debt.

And how about all of the unfunded pensions? What about the t-bills being held by those pension funds? Are we saying we will not pay those pensions out when its time to?

Because I’m iokay with that — lets cancel all intra government debt on both sides of the balance sheet (SSA’s “asset” of tbonds, and treasuries liability of the bonds in SSA’s “trust fund) and cancel the whole fricking program.

jake-the-goose on January 23, 2013 at 3:24 PM

I like that motto…with your permission, I think I’ll use it in my daily life.

I would note, however, that not all the problems we have lie in either spending or revenues. There is still the entirely un-talked about problem of regulation which has as much of an impact on economic growth as either of the former.

Dusty on January 23, 2013 at 3:32 PM

Right, well, the problem lies with the ruling class completely and utterly embracing a dead, idiotic economic theory like Keynesianism. They do it because its politically expediant for them (they can get more power, spend as much as they want, and claim they’re HELPING the economy). Anything that interferes with free market exchanges — regulation, taxation, prohibitions, etc — is going to retard economic growth.

That is a related problem to our spending and “revenue” problem, but even if we were growing at a blockbuster rate, we are wayyyy wayyy past being able to grow ourselves out of this hole.

He is either unaware of what interest rates are, how compound interest works, or the FACT that the Federal Reserve is MONETIZING the national DEBT in spite of the fact that their charter prohibits such actions.

ANYONE that talks about government spending without mentioning the Federal Reserve is a fool.

Run. Run.

I would note, however, that not all the problems we have lie in either spending or revenues. There is still the entirely un-talked about problem of regulation which has as much of an impact on economic growth as either of the former.

Oh f_ck it – the world is full of idiots.