Cody, you were one of the things I wanted to check up on this afternoon. Glad you are still here! I went with my daughter and granddaughter to get some genetic testing results. Fortunately, we were given good news. Still have a cleft palate to correct, but we can handle that.
I was listening to a Congressman named Coburn on CSPAN last week. He described huge amounts of unneeded spending that occurs in Congress. Some of it was pork barrel, some were duplicate programs that could have been handled by fewer adminstrators. He also said Congress is really bad at oversight and creating benchmarks these programs need to reach in order to continue funding. These would be the very first ideas and areas I would look to for change and cuts.
After that, it is across the board pain. Everyone needs to share the burden WE created. Once the government shows us they are good stewards of our money, we need to raise taxes on the middle class and rich to aggressively reduce our debt.
Hope you continue to post here. This has been one of our better discussions on the topic in a while.
That is wonderful news saveliberty. I am not sure what the alternatives were, but judging by your post, I don't need to know and I am happy to hear that everything is well.
To start, the idea that programs (from federal all the way down to local police forces) have to spend a certain amount of what they were allotted by the current budget or they LOSE a percentage of what was deemed "excess funding." With this rule, they will always spend the maximum they can and this creates a wasteful attitude. This should be changed to something resembling roll-over minutes on a cellphone plan. If they are spending well under what they have been allotted however, I would suggest negotiations as to how better structure their funding.
Secondly, as for the concept of wasteful spending apart from the ridiculous "use it or lose it" attitude, it is true that there is budget abuse across the board. The idea, for instance, that we should send more funding over to defense programs WITHOUT THEM EVEN REQUESTING ANY is ridiculous. This is something from the Obama campaign that resonated with me. Whether or not Obama's ticket was any different doesn't matter, the point is that the defense commission and program decision-makers did not request more funding and should not receive anymore because of this. In fact, I see this as evidence of at least a slight excess of spending on our defense budget. This is just one example of what I could see being a widespread issue (I agree with saveliberty).
As for the raising taxes concept. I agree. It may be naive and liberal sounding to say, but I believe in sacrificing my own to tribute back into the government, even with its flaws and mistakes that we all know have gotten pretty bad sometimes, that has kept our standard of living well above most, if not all else, in the world. However, the point that our government needs to prove its modern-day worth monetarily and its modern-day trustworthiness is a valid one and I agree completely.
Another idea that I found being first introduced to me in a form from Warren Buffet (as mentioned earlier on this thread), is a minimum tax rate for all Americans. This combined with eliminating deductions and loopholes would be a very effective way to ensure fair treatment of all and still fund enough of the government so we don't collapse. Warren's suggestion of a minimum of 30% is a bit extreme and would rather see a minimum set of 25% or so, but I do believe capital gains could be raised a percent or two or at least solidified at a minimum of 15%.
Again, I can't stress enough that I would love to hear potential downsides and coherent, well-thought out, educated, fact-based arguments supporting the contrary.
P.S. I hope I quoted saveliberty correctly (if not, my apologies and the above quote was that of saveliberty).
Sure thing.
