Guy Claims That Even If You Zeroed Out Discretionary Spending for This Year (Including Reducing Defense Spending to $0), You'd Still Not Be Able To Balance The Budget

You couldn't pay all the entitlement programs, for example.

He has a cutesy way to define "entitlement programs," by the way -- he sneaks "farm aid" into there, which is usually not considered an "entitlement," and more than likely he is then dishonestly sneaking other accounts into that category -- but even so, this demonstrates the scale of the problem.

It is alarming that even conservatives engaged with the news and at least conversant with the numbers continue to suggest that this is a just a discretionary spending issue, and that we can balance things just by cutting some in those accounts.

We can't. It's bigger than that. And I don't know how you reform entitlements with the Democrats controlling the Senate, and making their 2012 campaign pledge to not reduce a dime of spending in these accounts.

By the way, a tactical shorter-duration shutdown might still be a good idea as far as forcing Obama to compromise further with us... but based upon math, not even shutting down government (including federal jails, the FBI, the military, etc.) for an entire year would actually get us balanced.

posted by Ace at 04:37 PM

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