If you add up all the money of all the billionaires in the United States, you’d get something like $8.2 trillion. If you look at what the government intends to spend this year, it’ll be about $7.4 trillion.
No one outside the far radical Left wants to confiscate all the billionaires’ money. The mainstream Left just wants to take some of it.
Put another way, if the Left got their way and had a wealth tax and increases in income taxes, we still would not generate enough tax revenue to equal what the government will spend this year. In fact, over the last twenty years, the amount of revenue the government has brought in, with taxes going up and down, has only fluctuated about five percent.
If the Democrats got their way and drove taxes up to seventy percent, we’d see wealth flee the United States, and the estimated revenue projections would never come in. This is not a debatable point.
So that raises the question: what are we going to cut?
The government cannot cut interest payments on the national debt.
The government actually needs to increase defense spending.
The biggest bit of the budget is the mandatory spending Congress does not touch for Social Security and Medicare. By 2032, Social Security payments will automatically be cut.
What else will be cut?
We have a bipartisan problem. Democrats want to raise taxes and cut defense spending, but increase social welfare spending. Republicans want to cut taxes to stimulate the economy, but Republicans spend as badly or worse than the Democrats.
Yesterday, on CNBC, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said the United States could grow its way out of the national debt problem. But this Administration has strangled the private sector economy with an onerous tariff regime that is difficult to navigate, lobbyist shaped, and most burdensome to the middle class and poor due to where all the exemptions on tariffs fall.
This Administration has also raised gas prices, which will have spillover effects on groceries and other aspects of the cost of living. So yes, we could grow our way out of the problem, but growth has averaged 2% or less the last few years and Donald Trump is committed to the economic policies of 1950’s Democrats that led to recessions.
So what are we going to cut?
The answer, I’m afraid, is nothing and then everything. The fiscal cliff approaches and it will be the biggest economic setback this country has seen since the Great Depression. It will be a bipartisan disaster and the politics of tomorrow are going to be even crazier than today.
On the Left and Right, socialists are rising. Both want to impose their view of the “common good” on you and your family through empowering unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. I am beginning to believe they all want the fiscal crisis to come so they can try to reshape the country in their image.
Buckle up. Neither side wants to let the crisis go to waste, so the crisis must come. The GOP could offer an alternative vision to the Democrats’ socialism, but the loudest voices in the GOP these days want socialism-lite. To quote Rush Limbaugh, “You can’t beat Democrats with Democrat-Lite,” but that’s where the GOP seems to be headed with the Vice President taking over MAGA.
Someone needs to chart a new course. In the 1970’s, both sides had decided the nation was in decline and Ronald Reagan chose to chart a different path and refuse to accept the idea of decline or detente. We are back again with both sides presuming our decline and China’s rise. The present leadership of both parties is failing us, and their vision for tomorrow involves giving them more power, insisting we can trust them to make right what they have made wrong.
Hopefully, between now and 2028, someone will emerge on the right who offers something other than the Diet Coke of Democrats, because you can’t beat the real thing.
Social security reform is a great place to start - raise the age to 67. I’m 1000% sure the spineless people we elect will instead simply means test it…, but they will all get their pensions. If the collective had only listened to W.
There are probably a thousand ways the government could cut. Just the brief touch with DOGE showed the waste that exists and the lack of political will among the ignorant to cut. Just cutting the percentage of the growth of government spending would help. Trump has terrible communication skills and frankly lacks the leadership and charisma of a Reagan or JFK needed to lead us out of this self inflicted disaster. My perception is he has sort of quit mentally and making it up as he goes as long as his family and the Lutnicks make $$$ and everyone at 1600 kisses his butt. Pathetic and such a huge disappointment.
Vance might be rising on X, but many every day Republicans (including many who enthusiastically voted for Trump / Vance) are fed up with both of them. My prediction is Vance crashes and burns and forms his new version of The John Birch Society. Except they’ll call it the Tucker Carlson Society…
Rubio has the charisma and conservative credentials, but he better leave Trump soon if he wants to run in 2028 (talk about stink on…) no one should want to be tied to him. DeSantis is the man to help get this done, but needs to work on his charisma / campaigning skills.
Two things will get us out of this mess. Thing one: term limits. No more than 12 years total in Congress, six terms as a Representative, two a a Senator, or some combination of that. Thing two; a balanced budget amendment. Both parties have spent like drunken sailors for far too many years.
By getting rid of “lifetime politicians” who become so entrenched in their comfy positions they forget about working for “we the people” and having fresh minds and thinking from “we the people”, some real work towards cutting the myriad entitlement programs (most of which have zero constitutional basis and most of which are rife with fraudulent, wasteful expenditure of public (read that to mean OUR money) might actually begin.
As it stands, these lifelong politicians are too fearful to do anything meaningful about deficit reduction because of what might happen to their precious careers and the insider trading that goes with it. That’s why we don’t see any meaningful progress on spending reductions and program elimination.
Wouldn’t surprise me if fully 30% of every federal dollar (remember this is public money - OUR MONEY -) spent on assistance and entitlement programs is spent fraudulently.
We all witnessed what happened to Greece a decade or so ago….
Does any one of us really want to have to live through that here? Until and unless we carefully consider who we are putting at the controls of our nation’s economic engine regulating system, we are heading full speed towards that same outcome and it’s not going to be pretty.