Obama submits a budget

[EuropeanFootballMale]

Until you do something with SS and the medi's there can be no balanced budget. 2007 spending levels don't work for those unless you change them. I don't see how this is an easy problem to solve.

[New Mexican Disaster]

Until you do something with SS and the medi's there can be no balanced budget. 2007 spending levels don't work for those unless you change them. I don't see how this is an easy problem to solve.

Don't forget military spending.

[NorthwestUteFan]

Don't forget military spending.

Sorry to say it, but the only way we had a balanced budget in the late 90s was through very large cuts in military spending.

Perhaps we Americans have outgrown the need to spend 47% of the world's total military budget.

[EuropeanFootballMale]

Don't forget military spending.

True, but that's easy to cut compared to the others

[New Mexican Disaster]

True, but that's easy to cut compared to the others

Good point those types of cuts will be the most difficult politically. I hope that this can be accomplished through cuts to formulas for cost of living indexing. This way is much less visible to the public.

[Jacob]

Until you do something with SS and the medi's there can be no balanced budget. 2007 spending levels don't work for those unless you change them. I don't see how this is an easy problem to solve.

That's not true. Medicare and Social security are fully funded by payroll taxes. They are not contributing to the deficit. Certainly not SS. They will be in the future, but not yet.

You have to deal with them--mostly medicare right now--to avoid future deficit problems, but they are not currently contributing to the deficit.

I looked into it a bit further and in 2007, federal spending was 2.7 trillion.
Next year, federal receipts (tax revenues) are projected to be 2.6 trillion and 3.0 trillion in 2013. See? I solved the problem without raising taxed in less than 2 years. By returning to 2007 spending levels. This is how easy it is.

See chart here for annual outlays and receipts:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfa....cfm?Docid=200

If we simply go back to 2008 spending levels, we still get a balanced budget in 2 years. That's because spending went from 3.0T in 2008 to 3.5 in 2009. It stayed about the same in 2010. But there is another ridiculous jump this year to 3.8T.

So, this is a really easy problem to fix. States do it every single year. They just tell everybody they are losing 5% of their budget and everybody makes due. End of story. Deficit gone.

Remember the 800B in "one-time spending" for TARP? And the "one-time spending" of almost a trillion for the stimulus? Well, those weren't one-time deals. They created the new baseline. Simply go back to spending before TARP and we've got our balance. Why are we making this so difficult? If we withdraw form Afghanistan sooner, a really big chunk of the savings comes from defense spending and the Democrats get to save their precious programs that they pretend are protecting the poor and vulnerable.

[New Mexican Disaster]

Remember the 800B in "one-time spending" for TARP? And the "one-time spending" of almost a trillion for the stimulus? Well, those weren't one-time deals. They created the new baseline. Simply go back to spending before TARP and we've got our balance. Why are we making this so difficult?

One reason that the states are able to deal with the 5% cuts is that the feds help them out and plug some of the gap. This happened during 2008-10 in a big way.