National Budget: Your Turn

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

Adjust the national budget according to your priorities

As you do, watch what happens to the national debt, see what you have to change in taxes, and see if you can afford your priorities. Interesting if nothing else than to see the estimates of what things cost (or don't cost) compared to the impressions we get from what we hear and read in the news, on blogs, etc.

[jgibson2[$]]

You have to accept the inherent biases of the program, though. There's very little room to cut spending, only to increase taxes.

[brian_igo]

jgibson2 said

You have to accept the inherent biases of the program, though. There's very little room to cut spending, only to increase taxes.

That's not an inherit bias, that's reality. Discretionary spending only makes up 38% of the budget. The rest, mostly Social Security payments, Medicare and interest on the national debt, is outside of the annual budget process.




Most of the HHS budget is for Medicare, and Bush created a deficit nightmare with his unfunded prescription drug benefit. You can't reform that without rewriting the act.

Take away that, the $450 billion spent this year on interest payments, and Social Security (which is still running a surplus) - and the only area of big spending to cut is Defense.

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

Some of the taxes I "raised" in my attempt weren't raises as much as they were repealing recent tax breaks Seriously, I love things like this because everyone makes such a big hoo-hah about Program X ("Look at all this money spent on Program X! It's too much! cut it!") and tools like this are great at educating people that Program X is a mere drop in the federal budget compared to other stuff we never hear about (and perhaps might want fewer of our tax dollars funding).