Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
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Republicans want to reduce the deficit, and they’ve suggested a range of areas to cut spending.
An analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Budget found balancing the budget would require some massive cuts.
That is, if tax increases, defense spending, Social Security, and Medicare remain off the table.
Right now, all eyes are on what Congress wants to spend on — or decide to chip away at.
Republicans want to pare down the deficit, and it’s something that Democrats seem to be open to, as well. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said that the upcoming White House budget will have “substantial deficit reduction over the next decade,” according to Reuters, and Democrats are willing to discuss cost-cutting measures with Republicans independent of the debt ceiling.
But if the government wants to get serious about its spending, it’ll have to make some pretty big cuts, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). According to a CRFB analysis, all government spending would have to be reduced by 27% to get budgets balanced in the next decade — and, if tax increases, defense spending, Social Security, and Medicare are all off the table, 78% of spending would have to be cut.
That “effectively means you’re eliminating almost all of government other than the military and programs specifically for middle class seniors,” Marc Goldwein, a senior policy director at CRFB, told Insider. “It’s just not realistic.”
As the New York Times notes in its visualization of CRFB’s analysis, to close the gap between now and 2033 would require $16 trillion in spending cuts — the same size as all of Social Security, or all of Medicare plus every anti-poverty program.
“The thing is the government has basically three gigantic programs and it’s the US military, Social Security, and Medicare,” Goldwein said. As Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman once wrote, the US government is “best thought of as a giant insurance company with an army.”
With the military, Social Security, and Medicare off the table for cuts, it means other programs would have to be on the cutting block to balance the books. That means you would have to say goodbye to things like visiting national parks, and accessing food assistance programs, as the New York Times reports.
“The idea we’re just going to eliminate all parts of government other than Social …read more
Source:: Business Insider