so you don't know how to cut our deficit, but you are hopeful that the Republicans will...lol..ok.....well can you tell us any ideas that the Republicans have to cut the deficit. and I would love to read on this tread (in which you are the OP) of your ideas to cut the deficit.
No, I know how to cut our deficit, I dont know what the Republicans are going to do to cut the deficit.
Do you just want to hear me bitch about the Republicans? Ok, John Behnor(sp) who is going to be the speaker of the house got asked that question. And he said that as one of the things he is going to do is cut his budget by 5% and some other budgets or something that will add up to 25 million dollars. Now that is a token bullshit gesture. At 20% I would be relatively happy. Why doesnt he do something impressive though... Why doesnt he take a 50% pay cut or give his salary back to the government. Now that would make me happy. So, unless that was just the tip of an enormous spending cut iceberg the Republicans are going to unveil in January then it doesnt bode well.
My ideas?
Social Security: Means testing immediately. Anyone with an income of 100,000 or more while retired would not get social security payments. Possible further limitations, the numbers would have to be looked at. Anyone 50 or under would have the retirement age upped by 5 years. I would like to eliminate social security for anyone 40 or below.
Medicare: The government admits there is at least 20% fraud and if they admit that I suspect it is much higher. What we need to do here is hire a private company to create a system of electronic medical records for medicare and medicade patients. Medical procedures must always be tied to a patient record and it would all be in one location. There would be checks in the system to make sure a patient didnt have 12 procedures done on the same day or 2 in different states, etc. Also, have patients recieve notifications of what procedures their account is being charged so if it is being illegally used they can contact the authorities. This would cut quite a bit of waste and fraud out of the system.
Military:
Remove all troops from overseas including Germany, Japan, South Korea, etc. Pull out of Iraq and Afganistan. We should not try to be policeman of the world anymore. I would like to lead by example, not try to nation build. Cut the military down by 30-50% through attrition and re-design it to be a smaller, better trained and better equiped fighting force designed to meet the threats we will face in the current and future world. I think we could easily cut 20-30% out of the military budget over a period of time.
Subsidies... Eliminate all subsidies domestic and foreign. Face it, we are beyond broke. Any money we give foreign countries or to price fix is borrowed from China. So, no more payments to Israel, no more sugar subsidies, ethanol will have to pay for itself, bye bye funding for the institute of the arts, PBS, etc..
Congress: Instead of paying yourselves fat salaries of 150-200K why dont they get paid the average salary for an American? Or better yet the average salary for a soldier... Lets give the politicians a reason to help the middle class do better. Why do they get most of their expenses paid by fat expense accounts and then get 20K a month? Term limits should be imposed as well. I am tired of these crusty politicians with 10-20 year reigns because they manage to get the most pork back to their states.
Education? Lets face it, the current system is a failure. Eliminate tenure. Begin to institue private charter schools with vouchers and transition to a private education system with standards set by the government. Teachers should have no tenure protection, it is an antiquated benefit that now causes more problems than it is worth.
I could go on for a while but SS, medicare/medicade & the military are about 60% of the budget so that covers alot of it.