Entitlements

In an earlier post I talked about cutting spending to reduce the deficit.  I put together a list of suggestions that would reduce the deficit by at least eight hundred billion dollars.

• End all wars and military operations in the Middle East, Asia (Korea, Japan, etc), Europe (Germany, France, Poland, Italy, etc), Africa, and South America. Permanently shutter all bases in same countries - return equipment to the USL48, and sell bases to those countries. Cancel all contracts for new weapons programs. Replace them with maintenance programs for existing equipment. (Save $500-600B+/yr)
• End all foreign aid. (Save $50-60B/yr)
• End all energy, agriculture (sugar, corn, etc), military-industrial, prison-industrial and big-pharma subsidies. (Save $37-40B/yr)
• Abolish the TSA, FDA, ATF, DEA, EPA, FCC, FTC, DOE (edu), HUD, FHA, Fannie and Freddie and all rules and regulations created by those departments or by the executive branch in the name of those departments. (Save $190.5-200B/yr)
• Abolish the US Postal service - or spin it off completely. No subsidies. (Save $12-15B/yr)
• End the drug war. (Save $15-20B/yr)
• Leave the UN and NATO. (Save $0.5-1B/yr)

Minimum savings: $804.5 Billion

While this would be a great way to reduce the size of our government, in reality it will not be able to solve the spending problems we are facing.  Note that I specifically limited my cuts to discretionary spending.  These expenditures exclude mandatory programs such as social security, medicare, etc, and the interest on the national debt.  The problem is, the mandatory expenditures now exceed the total revenue of the United States government, as you can see by reviewing the annual budget.  In 2012 total federal revenues stood at $2,469 billion.  Mandatory expenditures were $2,252 billion and interest was $225 billion.

So though my suggestions would "halve the size" of the government, we cannot balance the budget by cutting discretionary spending.  Even if we eliminated all such spending, and just paid for social insurance programs and interest, we'd still have to borrow eight billion dollars.  And this number will grow over time.  This is the uncomfortable fact that social security defenders don't want to confront.  The programs are not even sustainable right now, let alone out into the future.

The consequences of this unsustainable debt load are going to hit this country like a freight train, and the rest of the world will follow our collapse.