Federal Spending Deficits

America needs to eliminate government spending deficits.

Imagine if you had been borrowing an amount equal to half of your income for the last 12 years. When you suddenly stopped after spending all of the borrowed money on stuff with no tangible value and were faced with the debt, that would suck, right? Well, here we are.

The yearly cost of the federal government is equal to the yearly federal budget deficit: $1.3 trillion.

The rest of federal spending is on entitlements and debt payments. Cutting entitlement spending is a non-starter: Americans pay for these programs because they make sense and are no longer a Ponzi scheme (well, maybe medicare is but we'll fix that).

While we can’t eliminate the entire federal government, we have to dial it way back. Piecemeal changes won't do it, we have to dig deep.

My proposed solution:

1. Cut the following departments:

• $73 billion; Energy - For this kind of money, we should have workable fusion by now. Instead we have radioactive waste piling up all around the country. We have a crumbling power grid that uses aluminum wire instead of copper: this was OK when energy was cheap, not now.
• $43 billion; Education - We're not even in top 10 of world rankings so I can't say we're getting much bang for these "invested" bucks; see blog entry on this subject.
• $14 billion; Commerce - With huge trade deficits year after year, whose side are they on?
• $19 billion; NASA - Tough cut for an engineer like me but we have bigger problems.
• $12 billion; Interior - This is a giveaway except for the national parks. Give the parks to EPA.
• $73 billion; Transportation - With highways crumbling, bridges failing, trains dying in bad weather and jets flying into skyscrapers, I'm not seeing value. Give air traffic control to DoD.
• $13 billion; Labor - Government is supposed to protect us all and yet government employees are unionized? This agency is obviously useless. There is also a conflict of interest since a government agency is helping to drive up the cost of government.
• $26 Billion; Agriculture - This agency is a big giveaway to big agriculture.
• $43 billion; Homeland Security - We have DoD, CIA and FBI so this is just a duplication of effort. The idea was to share information but it took 10 years to find Bin Laden?
• $48 billion; HUD - Our urban centers are a mess, real estate values have plunged and foreclosures are at an all time high. Again, I don't see value.

We’ll keep Treasury, State, Justice and Defense: the original four. We’ll also keep HHS, the VA and the EPA. Savings is $321 billion.

2. Cut DoD to pre-9/11 levels. Savings is $300 billion.
3. Ban profiteering on healthcare. Savings up to $400 billion; see blog entry on this subject.


Steps 1-3 shave about $1.02 trillion/year of the $1.3 trillion/year deficit.


4. Eliminate the rest of the Bush Tax cuts. This raises $350 billion/year.


Budget balanced with a small surplus to help with underfunded Medicare and Medicaid. This, when combined with the new 3.8% tax on unearned income for rich folks and the abolishing of healthcare profits will take the Ponzi out of healthcare.

Also a semi-balanced approach: big cuts to reduce bloat, industry kicks in and taxes restored to earlier levels.


Not everyone will agree with my choices but the intention is to show the scale of what's needed to eliminate deficit spending. Any serious attempt to meet this goal will cause some pain but to stay on the deficit path will be worse.

This is the first step. We still have a big debt that also needs addressing.