Not sure what your point is. I'm not sharing the article/infographic and animated budget scenarios as "this is what needs to happen" from some party's perspective. The point is a graphical display of the size of different buckets (which I take as fact) and the sliders that you can play with. The cases being presented are just examples. You can mentally slide the bars / cut line and see how much is required.
> "I also find it funny how the infographic doesn't show a scenario where only defense cuts are made, because it would show us how cutting defense spending is a really simple path toward a balanced budget without changing anything else.
I don't know if you have looked at it, but the defense bar is as big as each of the Medicaid, other mandatory, and "all other" spending bars each. You would have to cut the entire defense budget and still not solve the problem, and only make a fractional share of what is achieved if you implemented cuts to those other programs.
> "Another example of the flaws of this argument/article is how Social Security is self-funded, and not in any financial jeopardy on its own. [1] Some of the other entitlement programs on the list also work that way."
Maybe you have to redefine your definition of self-funded. Sure it is self-funded, as long as taxes increase a lot, given the demographic wave coming. If taxes don't increase, or one of these other options, it will run out of funds. If we don't agree on that, we have a problem. This is the entire debate about the problem we face.
> "Regardless, my understanding is that a government's budget never has to be balanced. It doesn't operate like a family household...."
Well, correct, but the question is how deep do we go into the hole. If you read the story, and the charts, you can see the projections of debt going to 200% GDP. At that point we will be paying enough interest on our debt to have funded several large programs themselves.
> "You're saying our only options are for taxes to rise, benefits decreasing, increasing retirement age, or snowballing debt. But why are those our only options?"
And the other options are?
> "The other part would be looking at government inefficiencies and flawed policies that aren't on your list. For example, should we not talk about how suburban development and the interstate highway system is a monetary drain on wealth for the majority of the country?"
Sure, talk about it, but can you change the bulk of the US to capture whatever benefit you can from that change, within 50 years to save the programs needing the money?
> "I know I've spent a lot of time on this one issue as a specific example, but it's really just one of many ways in which being smart and efficient about the use of the vast wealth generated by the US would go a long way...."
The talking is all good, but the bottom line is will your proposals come up with the money in time?
We can start changing it today, and save ourselves the pain of having to deal with it when we retire.
It would also improve the quality of our day-to-day life on many dimensions, long before we do.
What the grandparent poster is alluding to is that our culture is sick with a myopic, penny-wise-pound-foolish mentality, where people are personally spending tens of thousands of dollars for a service that could be provided collectively for thousands of dollars. While also complaining about outrageous taxes.
The fancy little sliders are reinforcing the idea that “the money must come from one of these things” when it really should just come from progressive taxation at a reasonable rate instead of letting the wealthy off easy.
The Republican Party cut the taxes of the wealthy in 2017 and increased the deficit by doing so. They can’t be trusted to give advice about government spending because their basic party platform is that government is bad, the wealthy need tax relief, and their actual legislative track record is increasing the deficit. And yet here they are telling us through their study and this complimentary article that the only way to cut the deficit is to fuck the poor and the elderly.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/571754894/charts-see-how-much...
I also find it funny how the infographic doesn't show a scenario where only defense cuts are made, because it would show us how cutting defense spending is a really simple path toward a balanced budget without changing anything else.
Another example of the flaws of this argument/article is how Social Security is self-funded, and not in any financial jeopardy on its own. [1] Some of the other entitlement programs on the list also work that way.
Regardless, my understanding is that a government's budget never has to be balanced. It doesn't operate like a family household. Oftentimes, national debt is used for pursuits that return on their investment.
You're saying our only options are for taxes to rise, benefits decreasing, increasing retirement age, or snowballing debt. But why are those our only options? I think that argument is flawed and short-sighted. I don't think slowing population growth rate automatically means that those are our only options.
I only like one of those options: taxes on the wealthy and ultra-wealthy have a lot of room to rise. Jack them up, billionaires shouldn't exist, and people like Jeff Bezos shouldn't have a single-digit tax rate.
The other part would be looking at government inefficiencies and flawed policies that aren't on your list. For example, should we not talk about how suburban development and the interstate highway system is a monetary drain on wealth?
It's really obvious to me how building more sewer, road, and utilities per person and forcing everyone to own one car per capita or more is a dumb waste of money on a national level, and our government on every level plays a heavy hand in subsidizing that development pattern.
It would be really easy to afford my tax rate increasing to a much higher level if I wasn't forced to own more than one car just to get myself to work. It would be easier for me to afford housing if a bunch of single family home owners weren't preventing dense housing from being built.
But no, let's add one more lane and make our retirees work until they're 85 rather than fixing our structural problems that make America a very expensive and energy-wasteful place to live.
Because when you think about it, wealth is basically access to energy, and America is squandering their own wealth by dumping it into their GMC Yukon Denali Ultimate with 14MPG.
[1] https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/info-2020/10...