How to balance the budget through spending cuts
"Ezra Klein: Your paper, as I read it, tries to take the vague talk of spending cuts and show what it looks like when translated into real reductions in the funding of real programs. So what’d you learn from the exercise?
Michael Ettlinger: Well, when you talk about cutting spending, you’re talking about cutting things that serve a useful purpose and for the most part are popular. You dig into it, and there’s not a line in the budget that says waste, fraud and abuse. Every line has a rationale behind it.
EK: So then why do people believe that there’s so much waste and fraud in the government? If these programs serve purposes and are basically popular, and they’re where the money goes, why does the government’s spending have such a bad reputation?
ME: To make up some numbers, 60 or 80 percent of the public supports any given line in the budget, but the remainder don’t support that given line. So all of us have 10, 20, 30 percent pf the budget we think could be cut. So as long as that’s in the budget, all of us individually think there are budget cuts that should happen before I pay higher taxes."
1 comment:
That's a beautifully simple way of looking at it, and a demonstration of one of the fundamental inefficiencies of a democracy. Of course, the media constantly running exposés about government waste certainly colors the general public's belief.
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