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NY Times Week in Review–Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget
23 comments on “NY Times Week in Review–Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget”
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Additional taxes will never fix the problem. If you give to them, they will spend it. Two things left out of spending cuts are getting rid of Medicare and replace it with an income based supplement to purchase health insurance and phase out Social Security altogether. This would also cut the size of HHS substantially. And instead of sending our money to Washington and having them tell us how to educate our children, why don’t we just keep that money at home, and completely eliminate the department of Education. We should also re-combine the Commerce and Labor Departments and make the VA part of DoD. And if someone could actually tell me what the Department of Energy does, I’d be both grateful and surprised.
#1,
Yes, yes, YES!!! I am a Federal Employee and I would be willing to take an immediate pay freeze. I am also in favor of reducing our work force by 200,000 through attrition AND the contractors by more than 200,000. We need much better oversight of our contracting processes as well. The Dept. of Education is a complete waste and IMHO has been a detriment to education across the entire nation. The Dept. of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are separate, so I agree with doing away with the DoE. I also think we need to pull our troops out of Europe. Our defense dollars spent there have allowed their socialist state to flourish at our expense. Let them pay for their own defense. We should pull out of Korea and Japan as well. Why do we have our military scattered around the globe when we have a powerful navy, airforce, and ICBMs to secure our defense. Why not station our military at our own borders to defend us from the drug and illegal immigrant invasion there? Deport illegal immigrants, end the “anchor baby” laws, and prosecute those that employ illegal labor.
In my opinion it’s a lousy and misleading exercise, not a good one, for it has constrained severely the choices even possible. Several examples:
*No option to repeal ObamaCare
*No option to return spending, across the board, to FY2000 levels.
*no option to treat all employer-provided medical insurance — beyond the cost of a basic $10,000 – deductible catastrophic policy — as fully taxable income.
*No option to eliminate entire federal departments having no apparent constitutional basis.
*No option to shift all employee FICA contributions for everyone under 50 to a personal 401(k)-type account. Yes it would cost more for about fifteen years, after which the savings become tremendous.
In the end, however, the ultimate budgetary dilemma is this:
[b]It is [i]impossible[/i] to generate both government and private-sector surpluses as long as the nation is running a current-accounts (trade) deficit[/b]. A great deal of that deficit arises from oil imports.
The most essential missing option, therefore, is that of a crash program to convert as much of our economy as possible to coal, specifically liquefied coal, natural gas, and nuclear electricy. A key component of that effort would be a ten-year suspension of many aspects of both the permitting process and the majority of environmental regulations.
A great calculator.
“phase out social security” – people have been paying into Social security for years. They deserve what they have poured money into. It boggles the mind that people would change from a mutual insurance common pool to trusting the investment bankers who created the financial crisis.
What they should do is not put a cap on payments into social security, but put a cap on payout. The wealthy don’t need the money; and it ensures that the elderly don’t live in poverty.
Bart, the calculator seems to use some realistic proposals that are in fact in congress.
But I had the same complaint in the beginning. I’d like, for example, the calculations to include real universal health care where doctors are salaried; a place to add particular national proposals (say, expanding Americorps). And I’d love to include radical reductions in defense spending as well. I’d also like to see a place where we could invent our particular tax code, that includes confiscatory taxes (90%) on estates valued more than 10 million dollars, where there is no investment in business. I’d also like to see some place where we could fund infrastructure with some realistic numbers that include the multiplier effect.
I guess we’d both be satisfied. It does reveal, however, that people aren’t all that interested in reducing the deficit, and that is really a political red herring. The fact is that one can’t have it both ways: reduce the deficit and lower taxes. Eventually, math gets in the way.
Hey, #5, do you have a list of doctors in the US willing to take salary? What will you do to keep them from leaving medicine altogether? So, who provides the health care while we wait for the government trained doctors that will work for salary? Will we have recourse for malpractice by these salaried doctors?
I would be very happy if Social Security was declared bankrupt and they stopped taking money from me and my family. I do not like it when others force me…yes FORCE me to pay for their ideology. Let me opt out or you are part of an oppressive tyranny. You seem to think you know what is best for me better than I do. Go pound sand.
#4 John–Your argument on SS is about the darndest thing I’ve seen. We can’t phase it out because people have paid into it, but the people who have paid the most in don’t deserve it? Plus, when I say phase it out I mean over a long period of time and for younger people. My children are 29 and 26 and they have no expectation that they will ever get a nickle back. Lets let them start p[reparing for retirement now with no expectation of SS. Anyway, FICA is a TAX not a retirement program. I’d love to have been able to let those evil bankers you talk about have had all the money I’ve put in since 1965–I’d be a multi-millionaire. And I still contend that Charlie Rangle, Chris Schumer and Chris Dodd got us in the mess we’re in. I have also recently become an advocte of closing Freddie and Fannie and eliminating the home mortgage deduction to get the government totally out of the housing market. The reason we got into it–the deprerssion and post WWII housing needs no longer exist.
“Hey, #5, do you have a list of doctors in the US willing to take salary?”
Isn’t this a job for the “invisible hand”? The magic of the marketplace? If medical funding transitions to a salary based model, that’s where the jobs will move. Negotiations will take place. The salaries will end up being more than the funders want to pay and less than the doctors want to take, just like everybody’s salary. It’s not surprising that a lot of people don’t want to raise their hands and volunteer to take a salary before the negotiations even start.
Anyhow, the evidence I’ve seen is pretty compelling that a non-salary based model encourages a lot of waste and expense in the system.
My father-in-law is a pathologist, now-retired for a decade. His last Medicare-service payment arrived nearly three years after he had retired, and his ultimate Medicaid-service payment (from Illinois) was received just over four years beyond his last day in the office.
John W: when government has made Medicare and Medicaid world-wide examples of well-run government health insurance, you can talk to me about some additional government involvement.
And when the Indian Health Service and the VA are also world-wide examples of well-run government health [i]service[/i], I’m prepared to consider putting more doctors on the government payroll. Remember the Walter Reed hospital scandals?
Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and IHS are presently cogent proof that government involvement is counter-productive. See also NHS in the UK and a depressing number of other examples.
“Anyhow, the evidence I’ve seen is pretty compelling that a non-salary based model encourages a lot of waste and expense in the system.”
It also pays people for what they actually do. I had an older friend and mentor who went to France to practice (his wife was French so they could pull this off somehow). The physicians worked 9 to 2 and saw as few patients as possible in the public system and then had their private practices. It drove my friend crazy.
43% tax hikes, 57% spending cuts, I balanced the budget, bring it on.
[blockquote]And if someone could actually tell me what the Department of Energy does, I’d be both grateful and surprised.[/blockquote]
The DOE arranges for the construction and installation of nuclear reactors in all nuclear powered navel vessels. The DOE is responsible for the transportation and storage of military nuclear waste. The DOE is responsible for the clean up of any site that is contaminated by nuclear waste. The DOE is responsible for the security of our nuclear weapons stockpile. The DOE acquires petroleum for and manages the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve. The DOE advises congress and the president on energy matters, such as the size and location of untapped petroleum reserves, the effect of growth in other nations on the availability of petroleum for US industry, and the current capacity of US and foreign energy producers. The DOE monitors and advises on the actions of OPEC and other oil cartels, and the impact of those actions on US interests. The DOE tracks and advises Congress and the President on the proliferation of nuclear technology. It is true all of these things could be transferred to another department, but I think we might be surprised if we just eliminated the DOE tomorrow.
[blockquote] I do not like it when others force me…yes FORCE me to pay for their ideology. Let me opt out or you are part of an oppressive tyranny. You seem to think you know what is best for me better than I do.[/blockquote]
Do you feel the same about all government spending? If I believe in open boarders should I be able to say I do not want to pay for a border patrol or fences. Let me opt out and I won’t complain if Mexicans take my job? If I believe drugs should be legalized, would you agree I should not be required to pay taxes that will go toward the arrest and imprisonment of drug dealers or to bomb drug production facilities in foreign countries? How about the military. If I am opposed to war and not worried about invasion, can I opt out of military protection? Can I say don’t bill me for the military, I will defend myself when the Chinese invade?
[blockquote]Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and IHS are presently cogent proof that government involvement is counter-productive. See also NHS in the UK and a depressing number of other examples.[/blockquote]
Actually Medicare was a bad insurance model from the start. The premise is that we put the oldest and the sickest citizens all together into one pool and allow for profit insurance companies to dump people into that pool when they do not want to cover them any more.
Nonetheless I actually think Medicare has worked amazingly well given what it has to work with. The health and longevity of senior citizens and the disabled has gone up dramatically since the introduction of Medicare. In addition the average physician’s income on an inflation adjusted basis has also gone up since the introduction of Medicare. Had Medicare been open to younger healthy people from the start, it probably would be solvent today. Bringing younger people into the system would have reduce the per patient cost. Even more amazing every poll shows that a larger percentage of senior citizens are happy with their Medicare coverage than people on private insurance are.
A study conducted in May of 2009 produced the following results:
1. Access to care. In spite of having poorer health and lower incomes than those with Employer Sponsored Insurance (ESI), elderly Medicare beneficiaries were less likely (20 percent versus 37 percent) to report access problems due to cost, such as not filling a prescription or not visiting a doctor for a medical problem.
2. Financial pressure. Despite their lower incomes, elderly Medicare beneficiaries reported fewer problems with medical bills, such as inability to pay or being contacted by collection agencies. Fifteen percent of them reported at least one of these problems, compared to 26 percent of those in the employer-coverage group. Furthermore, elderly Medicare beneficiaries were no more likely than those with ESI to be devoting 5-10 percent of their income or more to health care.
3. Quality of care. Sixty-one percent of elderly Medicare beneficiaries said that they had received excellent or very good care, compared to just half of those with ESI. Moreover, 57 percent of elderly Medicare beneficiaries were confident that they could get high-quality, safe care in the future, versus 46 percent of those in the employer group.
[blockquote]Quality of care. Sixty-one percent of elderly Medicare beneficiaries said that they had received excellent or very good care, compared to just half of those with ESI. Moreover, 57 percent of elderly Medicare beneficiaries were confident that they could get high-quality, safe care in the future, versus 46 percent of those in the employer group. [/blockquote]
That will come to a quick end if the lame duck congress doesn’t pass a SGR fix. Medicare patients will become hot potatoes. Access to physicians accepting Medicare will be extremely limited.
The writing is on the wall for Medicare recipients. Medicare will be paying less than medicaid in the near future despite any short term fixes. If you are thinking that you will be getting Medicare in ten years, and that your health care worries will be over, you are sadly mistaken. The baby boomers maybe will be all right. The rest of us will be screwed by the worst generation.
RE: “The magic of the marketplace?”
Uh — a State-controlled industry is not “the marketplace.” Might want to re-read basic high school economics textbook there.
RE: “Do you feel the same about all government spending?”
No — only that spending which violates the Constitution.
Problem with this little exercise is that it fosters the illusion that one cannot balance the budget without tax hikes. Of course, it can be done — by simply having more options for cuts in the section handily titled “DOMESTIC PROGRAMS AND FOREIGN AID.”
But the NY Times wanted to propagandize for a certain ideology.
I expect people will figure it out though.
As Bart points out, no option to kill Obamacare. It has been [url=http://gatewaypundit.rightnetwork.com/2010/11/obama-white-house-hands-out-111-obamacare-waivers-hides-it-from-public-video/ ]revealed that the administration has given 111 waivers[/url] to well connected business and organizations (lots of unions!). So some bureaucrat gets to decide who has to obey the law? And of course, the little guys, especially small businesses with over 50 employees, get the shaft.
Our defense dollars spent there have allowed their socialist state to flourish at our expense. Let them pay for their own defense.
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“As Bart points out, no option to kill Obamacare.”
My guess is you’d want to kill it with your own set of assumptions about how much worse it’s going to be than advertised. The official scoring by the CBO suggests that killing the health care reform act would not be a good thing for the deficit, long term.
Only because the CBO scoring was jiggered to include ten years of taxes, yet only six years of ‘benefits.’ I could make my farm look really profitable if I counted ten years of income against six of expenses.
As it is, the jiggered ObamaCare numbers were barely positive. Now, pop quiz: name a US government program in which the expenses have come in [i]under[/i] those initially forecast.
Bart hall, are you saying that corporations always forecast correctly? How about banks? Interesting. I would never say that governments get things perfect, but I’m not a utopian.
Of course, I also think that people who run businesses also make mistakes; and that while they may know how to drive a car, I’m not sure they all make great mechanics. That is: let them run businesses, but remain skeptical of their tools to fix the economy. A great fiddler may not always know how to notate music.
From what I’ve read, People are more satisfied under medicare than those under private insurance. Anecdotally, I don’t know of a single soldier who has anything bad to say about the VA system. Plainly, government isn’t perfect when it comes to medicaid, but it’s a lot better than the alternative. I remember the old guy who yelled at his representative “Don’t let the government touch my medicaid” during the debates. Is Medicare perfect? Not at all. Is it better than private practice? sometimes. In fact, medicare allows insurance companies to remain profitable.
We’ve had this discussion before about government. Over the last 30 years, and since the Gulf of Tonkin and Watergate, there’s been a diminishment of trust in the government – and for good reason. But there was once a time when people trusted our social institutions. Eisenhower could build roads; Kennedy could build for the moon. Those were the days of the cold war, right? But if one does have a government – it is wise to elect leaders who want to run it well, and see it as a force for good, accountable to the public, and attentive to the long term. Institutions that are built for private profit, have no incentive to support the public, and can make quick profit without paying the consequences for harming others, are useful in the system of commerce. But being attentive to one’s private institutions is far different than managing competing needs in the public sphere.
Our sourcing, for example, our nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan has been financially irresponsible and created a culture of war profiteering. It would have been wiser to let our army do the work.
There is plenty of waste in insurance companies because they hire lots of marketers, sales people, and persons hired to reduce payouts – individuals who have nothing to do with providing health. We don’t pay merely for doctors or nurses: we pay for plenty of administrators in the health system.
[i]are you saying that corporations always forecast correctly? How about banks? Interesting. I would never say that governments get things perfect, but I’m not a utopian.[/i]
Of course corporations don’t always forecast correctly. Nor do small businesses such as my own, or even families. The difference is that in the private sector, when we get things wrong we suffer — or [i]should[/i] suffer — the consequences. That’s why I am so virulently opposed to the numerous bailouts of politically well-placed banks, auto unions, and so on.
The longer and more intensely we attempt to shelter people and businesses from the consequences of their bad decisions, the more deeply poor decision-making becomes entrenched in the economy.
Government types have been exempted from the consequences of poor decisions for decades. It’s one reason government no longer works very well.
In our greenhouse business if one of our hanging baskets is poorly designed we find out about it fast … because they all end up in the dumpster. It costs us hundreds of dollars, but guess what? We move on and don’t do it again.
We’re still stuck with the “War on Poverty” and its programs. Two generations and 9 Trillion dollars later, “poverty” levels are unchanged and the prisons are full of befuddled black men who never had a father or a grandfather to show them a better way.
And the proposed ‘solution’? Even more of the same.
When government builds concrete things, be they ports, highways, or airports, and such, the results are often quite good. Kansas is a big state with a small population, yet our road network is excellent, and I happily pay taxes for it.
When, however, government attempts social engineering — “War on Poverty,” national health care, farm subsidies, National Endowment for the Humanities, “prevailing wage” (meaning union wage), mandating the acceptable sorts of light bulbs and toilets, etc, etc — the decisions are rarely good ones, yet the bureaucracies become entrenched, the programs and the rules ossified, the mission always expanded, and the costs ever-growing.
That they continually ask those of us who must absorb the costs of our mistakes … also to absorb the cost of [i]their[/i] mistakes … is unsustainable. It will end.
The only question is how.
“We’re still stuck with the “War on Poverty†and its programs….
When government builds concrete things, be they ports, highways, or airports, and such, the results are often quite good. Kansas is a big state with a small population, yet our road network is excellent, and I happily pay taxes for it.”
Don’t many of the “War on Poverty” programs provide concrete benefits for people who need them? And, on the other hand, isn’t there waste and fraud and corruption and incompetence and “bridges to nowhere” and hundred dollar toilet seats in government infrastructure spending?
I don’t think the distinction is as clear cut as you make it out to be, except that you and I rely on roads the government builds but don’t rely on meals or housing the government provides. We put up with some amount of failure and mismanagement to support programs we find basically beneficial. In programs we don’t find so essential, any instances of failure or mismanagement immediately discredit the whole operation.
…by the way, I’d like to be clear that my comments weren’t intended to accuse anybody of not caring about the poor. But I experience in my own life a tendency to be more willing to “cut some slack” to an organization whose good results I experience than one I don’t; I’m just suggesting that others ask whether they might do the same.
“War on Poverty” — trillions spent, costs continue to rise, inner city families destroyed, “poverty” numbers haven’t budged in 40 years. The answer? We need to spend more.
“Education” — trillions spent, costs continue to rise, administration expands like a summer tick, American students fall farther behind the rest of the world for each year they spend in school, domestic test scores haven’t budged in 40 years. The answer? We need to spend more.