Goodbye Government, Under Either Fiscal Plan

[amborin]

".......The frenzied partisan horse-trading has glossed over what is arguably the central issue of any debate over long-term fiscal policy: the kind of role we expect the government to play in the nation’s future. ........

The truth is that both the president and House Republicans have agreed to shrink a critical part of the government to its smallest in at least half a century. This is regardless of which trillion-dollar proposal gains the upper hand.

Consider the president’s budget, which by law must include projections of taxing and spending over the next decade. Loath to raise taxes on the middle class yet unwilling to cut deeply into the budgets for Social Security or Medicare, the president and his advisers proposed cutting the discretionary part of the budget devoted to everything except defense and other security agencies to 1.7 percent of economic output by 2022, down from 3.1 percent last year.

This is not irrelevant spending. It accounts for every government expenditure except entitlements, security and interest. It pays subsidies for higher education and housing assistance for the poor. It finances the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. It pays for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and training programs for unemployed workers. Without such spending, the government becomes little more than a heavily armed pension plan with a health insurer on the side.

snip

To put it in perspective, this would cut the government’s civilian discretionary budget to the smallest it has been as a share of the economy at least since the Eisenhower administration — when a quarter of the population lived under the poverty line, thousands of children still contracted polio each year and fewer than one in 12 Americans older than 25 had a college degree. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, even going over the so-called fiscal cliff would not cut it as deeply.

snip

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/business/say-goodbye-to-the-government-under-either-fiscal-plan.html?_r=0

[AldoLeopold]

1. This is where I get into trouble on DU and elsewhere

Am I seriously supposed to say rah rah America when we'd sooner slash SSec than cut our titanic military? Am I supposed to say yah, its cool, everything will work out.

I'm just not on board anymore. Blargh.