Boy, is this a neat little budget calculator. You can use it to find whether your ideas of how to eliminate the federal deficit would do the job, or even reduce it significantly.
I found I could eliminate the projected 15-year projected shortfall without sacrificing anything I valued, and even generate hundreds of billions’ surplus. (Note: I do not say anything that benefits me. I want to preserve many programs that do me no good beyond promoting the general welfare and preserving human decency—programs like school lunches for the poor. Had I ejected programs I support on principle, and not for personal benefit, I’d generate huge surpluses for both 15- and 30-year projections.) I could not eliminate the 30-year projected shortfall without feeling a pinch to something I value, but I got close.
It was easy. All the big savings were in feeding the military-industrial complex; all the big revenue sources lay in simply returning to pre-Bush tax codes. Eliminate corporate tax loopholes: $136 billion Allow Bush-era tax cuts to expire for the wealthy alone: $54 billion. (Allowing them to expire for incomes below $250k, another $118 billion, but I didn’t check that box.) Iraq and Afghanistan: $51 billion or more. Reinstate the estate tax to pre-Clinton levels: $50 billion. Eliminate corporate subsidies: $23 billion. Farm subsidies: $14 billion.
These figures don’t even consider as an option proper progressive policy or FDR- and Truman-era fiscal policy; it’s just the somewhat-less-than transparently-plutocratic vision of the DLC. For example: asking that capital gains income be taxed at the same rate as ordinary income in a middle-class tax bracket—that is, around 30%, rather than the 15% rate currently enjoyed by Warren Buffet as his housemaid pays 30%, is one of the most left-leaning policies available to choose. A proper progressive tax scale isn’t even an option.
All those entitlements and the social safety net conservatives blame for our fiscal woes? Peanuts. Raise Social Security retirement age to 70: $13 billion. Medical malpractice reform: $8 billion. Even slashing the federal payroll by 10%: $12 billion. Not quite nothing, but such programs are not what’s breaking the budget, and cutting loose what remains of the national safety net isn’t what’s going to save the budget.
Still, odds are we’ll continue to hear a false equivalence between, say, the cost of war in Iraq and the cost of school lunches from politicians eager to preserve big money, and the news media will continue to report such distortions with a serious face.
(A caveat is appropriate here: The NYTimes doesn’t go out of its way to explain how it arrived at these figures. A few online acquaintances squawked at how the figures are skewed to favor the right wing, but these acquaintances are fairly left-leaning, so take that with a grain of salt. No doubt the right wing would find excuses to insist the figures inaccurately favor the left. Given the state of the right-wing noise machine and its unapologetic invention of “facts,†I wouldn’t trust such evaluations farther than I’d trust the Times…)
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