Words from the web
Led by chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, Republicans on the U.S. House Budget Committee passed a plan last week, calling for $5.1 trillion in cuts for health care coverage, food stamps and highway construction among other items as a way to balance the budget by 2024. Do you think such deep cuts are needed to balance the budget? How important is a balanced budget? Any chance these cuts will ever make it into law? How much of this is just political campaigning by Republicans?
“Of course we need a balanced budget. I have to live in reality. Washington needs to as well. Either way, we can never pay back $17 trillion dollars in debt, but at least this shows that someone is sane in the capitol. Decisions are tough, and it’s good to see that some are willing to make them.”
“No. I don’t think there should be deep cuts like that. How about Republicans, the House and President take a pay cut. That really sounds good.”
“Budgets should not be decided entirely by politicians. There should be three independent think tanks that recommend future budgets and the only thing our elected officials do is vote on one of the their plans. Most votes wins. Done.”
“Ryan’s budget only works, because his budget says it works. It makes assumptions about the tax base in the future, which are complete unknowns, in order to justify itself. It’s bad.”
“They’re diverting more money to companies and are cutting public “entitlement” programs to do it. This is especially true of the defense industry. In 2012 upwards of $1,400 billion dollars were spent via the Pentagon. That same year $80 billion was spent on the food stamp program. Our priorities are backwards. If we want to reduce the deficit, we need to stop corporations from bribing our politicians into giving them huge sums of our tax money. This corporate welfare subsidizing has been bleeding us dry for decades, and now we’re stuck with the compound interest incurring debt.”
“The success of any Paul Ryan proposal is always dependent on cuts to education because the entire country would need to be drooling idiots by 2024 to support it.”
“Did you really just ask if a balanced budget was important? Of course it is.”