Pelosi Backpedaling on Debt?

“It is useful to remember that Pelosi just lost 61 seats in the House and the Speaker’s gavel primarily because of her stewardship of the economy.”
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Yes. *Her* stewardship. That’s quite…useful.

Yep, That’s one seriously disingenuous statement. I didn’t realize that whatever bills Pelosi passed automatically became law. I guess that everything was just peachy before she became Speaker, huh?

Assuming of course that: 1) the Speaker is the “steward of the economy,” 2) that voters believe that the Speaker is the “steward of the economy,” and 3) that voters in specific elections, who picked the Republican over the Democrat, did so because the Speaker is the “steward of the economy.”

“backpedaling,” that is pedaling backwards like on a bike, not selling something backwards,i.e. “peddling.”

And, yes, I am aware that blogs don’t have editors. However, this knowledge is elementary. To journalists, words are professional tools and should be used correctly.

“…if you’re going to balance the budget and reduce the debt, you need to make sure everyone shares the pain in the process.”
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You’re goddamned right about that. And telling firefighters, war veterans and construction workers they’ll need to work until they’re almost 70, without adequate health care, while I slash my corporate tax rate to 26% and my personal income tax rate to 23%, isn’t really much sharing is it? The ever-growing cluelessness inside the Beltway bubble is simply breathtaking. You people are going to find yourselves on the wrong end of pitch fork if it kills you.

“if you’re going to balance the budget and reduce the debt, you need to make sure everyone shares the pain in the process.”

Massimo, is it arithmetic, logic or reading that’s failing you? The proposal is to have poor and middle class people work harder and longer (if they can get jobs in an economy where all workers are expendable after age 45), while tax rates drop 30% FURTHER for rich people and corporations.

All the pain comes from the middle class and poor, and all the benefit goes to the rich. Is that how they taught you “sharing” in preschool?

Please explain or correct.

This whole article is problematic.

Obama specifically asked legislators not to shoot down the bill immediately. So Pelosi could be responding to the President. She also might mean that in the end they will reach consensus on a proposal she can support. This is just a draft. Others have already expressed objections to your interpretation of the election results and Pelosi’s “stewardship of the economy.” I’d remind you that many of these voters who wanted to fire Pelosi did it by sending in representatives who want a tax cut for the richets 2% of Americans, so how does that jive with your “austerity” interpretation of the poll results.

Other quibbles. You say that for the plan to be effective everyone must share the pain. Why do you make that assertion? It is true that Bowles and Simpson want to take something away from most everyone but you don’t have to do that to come up with a coherent plan. There’s no logical requirement for it.

I also disagree with your assertion that everyone up to the very wealthy get hit here. The very wealthy get a lot of breaks including a flatter tax code, a lower maximum tax rate and a lower corporate tax rate. Meanwhile the working poor lose the earned income tax credit which means a lot to them and the middle class loses deductions both for mortgage interest and state and local taxes. This plan actually makes the tax code less progressive and far from sharing the pain actually presents the bill for the deficit to the middle class while bringing another round of appetizers to those at the top.

Massimo Calabresi:
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What does
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“…even spendthrifts on the left had the political sense…”
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mean?
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To whom are you referring, exactly?
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And, when you write
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“If the electorate was sending any message Nov. 2 it was a call for fiscal prudence.”
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, could you please specify how exactly you know this with such certainty?
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I had been under the impression that “the electorate,” if that’s what one could call the tens of millions of voters who remember the disastrous failures of movement conservative governance, and yet are so angered and disenchanted with current policy that they simply stayed home, was sending the message that the economy had better be fixed –standards of living for ordinary folks raised– and fast.
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What gives you the impression that eight years’ worth of failed foreign adventures and stagnating incomes followed by two years’ worth of double digit unemployment and the highest foreclosure rates in recent memory weren’t driving voter anger and disillusionment, Massimo Calabersi?
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Or are you, like so many of your fellow, other-directed Villagers, simply repeating what you’ve heard, so as not to seem out of step with this week’s Preferred Group Narrative?
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How exactly do you know any of this with such apparent confidence, Massimo Calabresi?
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Why shouldn’t readers assume that you’re regurgitating gossip, speculation and Conventional Wisdom, albeit in your trademark fatuous style?

Yes Massimo, please do explain this.

Amen,SZ. Thanks for taking the time for the complete fisking.

“And even spendthrifts on the left had the political sense simply to lie low and say nothing. After all, the chances of the commission chairmen’s proposal getting the votes needed to move it as an official plan, let alone enacted into law, remain low.”

By spendthrift I assume you mean those people who think it is a good idea to stimulate the economy in a major down turn? The same people who think it is a good idea to balance the books, when the economy recovers. In other words, dirty hippie, radical extremists.

“Why shouldn’t readers assume that you’re regurgitating gossip, speculation and Conventional Wisdom, albeit in your trademark fatuous style?”
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Is there anything else we can expect from our bankrupt corporate press? I must have seen at least 20-25 Very Serious Gasbags, from Mrs. Alan Greenspan to catfood champion Pete Peterson, bloviate about “entitlement spending” over the past 24 hours, without one single mention of health care costs, which is basically the entire “unsustainable” portion of “entitlement spending.” We really are on our own.

I think by “spendthrifts on the left” he means the people who balanced the budget the last time.

It is absolutely amazing how conventional wisdom can overwhelm simple facts. And yet this clown has a job, precisely because he puts the narrative ahead of reality.

if you’re going to balance the budget and reduce the debt, you need to make sure everyone shares the pain in the process.

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Really? What in heavens name does that mean? Does that mean we have completely given up on the idea that we evaluate government expenditures based on their efficacy, and on their good sense in the current environment? Is it really all just pork, to be shared out in a more measured way?
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There is no good public policy? There is just allocation among the snouts currently in the trough, and any balancing of the budget needs to lower the level equally?
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We can start with how this is a View from Nowhere approach–that a dollar spend paying a contractor to collect cost overruns on single pilot fighters with no discernible mission is exactly equal to a dollar spent on a Head Start program. We in the press don’t express an opinion on what is worthwhile or not, we just observe that everybody needs to cut back on their swag.
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Arrant nonsense.
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We are at a critical moment in US economic history. Will the US become captured by the oligopolistic plutocrats, or not? Bush opened up the treasury to them. So far, it looks like Obama is fine with that–wants to preserve the privileged positions of the current beneficiaries of government subsidies, monetary, contractual and regulatory.
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And, oh, just by the way, this is not about cutting any deficits. It is easy to put as back into surplus. Go back to the Clinton defense budget, Clinton tax rates, Clinton welfare policies. Add a successful health care plan (that is, one the copies any of the OECD member countries, or even just offers Medicare for all with a 3000 dollar deductible.)
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This is not hard. All that is hard is, ahem, inflicting the pain on the top couple of percentiles of earners who are at the heart of this economic disaster.

The headline has been changed to the correct meaning/spelling. Very responsive; I am impressed. Thank you!

Here’s what else you won’t hear: “outsourcing our jobs to China and India means no tax revenue from unemployed people” and “returning to Clinton era tax rates would solve this in one fell swoop.”

It’s those darn entitlements, you hear me! that’s the problem!

Yeah, see this makes no sense to my either Jay. I notice that we don’t have this “everyone is affected equally” requirement for any other policy. Like, when you have the earned income tax credit for working poor people you don’t also give it to people making $150,000 a year. We don’t demand that everyone serve in the military equally. Or that everybody gets a share of corn subsidy money whether or not they farm corn. I haven’t received a single research grant from the National Institute of Health this year. You?

But this pain has to be shared equally.

Except that… it isn’t.

It is useful to remember that Pelosi just lost 61 seats in the House and the Speaker’s gavel primarily because of her stewardship of the economy.

False premise, as explained previously. And exactly whom is remembering that useful for? Is it useful to you in that it gives what you’re writing about some ersatz sense of gravitas?

If the electorate was sending any message Nov. 2 it was a call for fiscal prudence.

Then why aren’t we letting those tax cuts expire, as the Republicans planned?

And even spendthrifts on the left…

Such as? Who on ‘the left’ has been spending money wastefully, Massimo? Do you have examples, or are you speaking from the inside of your rectum?

After all, the chances of the commission chairmen’s proposal getting the votes needed to move it as an official plan, let alone enacted into law, remain low.

As a whole, yes. But it gives cover for those who want to enact the worst parts on a piecemeal basis.

So why did Pelosi come out against it so fast?

It’s pretty easy to see that the suggestions of the chairmen don’t really benefit the bulk of the US population.

It seems more like a gag reflex that got Pelosi on the wrong side of this one.

I don’t like how you’ve framed that. You haven’t proved Pelosi is on the wrong side of anything.

You, on the other hand…

Progressives instinctively clench when someone proposes cutting tax credits for the poor or mortgage interest deductions.

While the ‘professional’ media instinctively cling to whatever the current conventional wisdom is that the Beltway consensus arrives at.

But Pelosi’s real position on the Bowles-Simpson proposal is already abundantly clear.

So?

Adding, an analysis you won’t see on teevee, or in TIME, but a pretty clear breakdown of how the idea is to screw middle income people, without actually doing anything to stabilize the budget.
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Because, of course, stabilizing the budget means taxing people who have used the infrastructure of this country to become very, very wealthy.
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http://www.openleft.com/diary/20824/the-details-are-worse

In some ways it’s funny. They’re not even pretending anymore. They waited to the midterms so that as many incumbents as possible could keep their seats, and now they are gonna put the wood to the little people. The losing Blue Dogs will cash in, free to vote their,errr, conscience. And Obama will tsk, tsk, tsk and say he tried but Alan and Erskine said that the wood must be put to the ordinary American.
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Time to start betting whether it will a right wing or left wing populist who tries to break this up in 2012.

Seriously. It’s like you read a different document.

One has to remember this report comes at a time when the “fiscal conservatives” are asking the country to borrow money to fund a 700 billion dollar wealth transfer to the rich.

As I understand it, this is only the chairmen’s report and has not been accepted by the full committee. Someone said this morning on NPR that frequently chairs put out their version for reaction before the committee comes together for a final version. Fourteen of the sixteen members have to agree or nothing happens.

Next, proposals would have to be presented to Congress. When this was originally proposed as a Congressional commission, they would have had the power to present directly, but the Repubs filibustered that because they were afraid it would include taxes. So now we have this group – a Presidentially appointed one. Any bets on the report going to Congress for an up or down vote (which is also part of it, I believe, like the base closing group?)

I have lost all my faith in Obama today.
“My issue”.. is the deficit. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.. in a time of war, no less.. added 4 trillion of the 5 trillion debt Bush ran up. Half of the 3 trillion in debt Obama has run up has been because he refused to repeal those Bush tax cuts.. but promised to let them run out. Now, now.. I have no idea who the man in the White House is. Someone has stolen Obama and replaced him with Bush.
Obama is signing up for a longer extension of the tax cuts for the rich that are bleeding America dry.
The deficit is a gut issue. People are on an instinctive level.. and Obama just has agreed to a one term presidency, by extending those tax cuts.
He could be fair and strong.. agree to a compromise.. like calling “rich” $500,000 instead of $250,000 because in big cities the price of living needs to be adjusted for.. democrats could agree to that.. but just bending over.. being some kind of spineless gimp boy.. Obama is foul.
I have been defending him.. for the last two years.. my loyalty true blue.. but the tax cuts for the rich.. that goes against the very grain of all my political convictions.
Obama is a coward and a tool.
Today, he has lost the 1012 election. I said it first.

That’s as opposed to spendthrifts on the right who support pointless wars of imperialism, and penetrating the underwear of Mormons with special rays to insure they are not planning to destroy America by setting their underpants on fire;
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They write this stuff. Editors read it and say “Hey now! Good job!”
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We are so effed.

And this isn’t the LEDE. It’s not news that the top two percentile will lock in their Bush tax cuts, tax cuts that generated the huge deficit that supposedly motivates the report’s existence.

I wondered about what BHO said about the tax cuts for the wealthy when he campaigned and found this.
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” Democrat Barack Obama says he would delay rescinding President Bush’s tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy”
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/07/obama-recession-could-del_n_124647.html
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I’m surprised there isn’t a serious progressive populist movement already. If one forms, am not sure what to call it – a left Tea Party is NOT a good analogy, esp. given Koch funding, etc.… although there have been many genuine TP’ers wanting low taxes, less govt. without the secret R backing / agenda. Some folks really believed in that but unless Rand Paul tries to deliver (but at what cost? Debt default? Govt. shutdown? but I digress) they’ll be disappointed at upcoming sellouts. I’d bet a real populist movement would offer a “third way” to the corporate politics (yes, pun intended).

“Progressives instinctively clench when someone proposes cutting tax credits for the poor…”

Seriously? You think it’s a bad thing to reflexively protect the poor? You think other liberals, moderates, and even principled Republicans are eager to dismantle the safety net?

Did you study The New Deal and The Great Society? They were landmark 20th-century government programs, based on the American democratic ideal that when everyone in society benefits, the nation is made richer, healthier, and more secure.

Just saying.

Alas, the danger is who replaces him? A Republican? President Palin? She is unlikely to win (but she’ll try to run, watch), but Mittens could if votes split. When enough D’s stay home… well, recent election shows what happens: stay home = hello Speaker Boehner and Senator Paul, “investigations”, over / under odds on govt. shutdowns and impeachment attempts, etc. If there’s going to be a sane third choice to replace Obama or Palin, we’d better find (and fund) a viable choice now.

Thanks for that. I’m reminded why I was one of the Hillary holdouts. So many little undercurrents.
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Don’t know if she would have done any better, but there were reasons why I was uneasy about him.

This goes way beyond Obama or Pelosi. This is about the breathtaking greed and hubris of our oligarchs. To have bought off and/or stolen our erstwhile representative government, trashed the country in nearly every way imaginable, left millions to twist in the savage economic winds they created and to now demand that everyone else sacrifice for their traitorous, avariciousness and incompetence and that they shalt not be taxed, is suicidally arrogant. The question is, who else will be the useful idiot tools of these psychopaths, beside Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats and the Village Gasbags.
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Anyone bought “letthemeatcake.com” yet? Pitchforks and torches in every size and color.

HuffPo a good soft porn site not much on getting news factually correct. I gave up on it long ago. If I want screaming, misleading headlines and equally piss poor fact checking in the copy I think I’ll pick up the NYPost.

That was well said, deconstructiva.

If the rich really want to share the pain, in honor of Veteran’s Day, why don’t they send their kids to fight the wars?

I don’t have much to add since everyone has pretty much got this covered. But I do have one question.
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Is Massimo Calabresi reporting here are is he trying to do a hard sell? I cannot tell the difference by the way he wrote this post. It’s almost as if he has an interest in the out come instead of just letting us know what’s going on. Which of course is supposed to be his job.

Another past Swampland poster tweets a thought –

pourmecoffee –

May start charity for rich with tax cuts to adopt elderly with social security cuts. They’d get a picture and everything!

The people on the right who think you can increase gov’t expenditures at the same time you cut gov’t revenue are known as “fiscal conservatives” by the media now, not spendthrifts. That may be due to the media having just arrived on earth in the last 5 months.
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Where did this guy come from? Did he gt a job at Fox, take a wrong turn, and end up writing for Swampland.

deconstructiva–
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What I find also amusing is the Little Tommy Friedman talk of a Third Party challenge, from a sensible Centrist who can Command the Middle with sensible policy proposals, unfettered by partisanship. Bloomberg made the very weird pronouncement that a 3rd party president would be able to to do things neither party could do, as if you need no political base to accomplish things in Washington..
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What is most amusing, though, is Obama is exactly that post-partisan Centrist, reaching beyond party to compromise on the what the nation really needs. He has (in his handlers’ mind) the additional virtue of registering with a couple of key identiies–blacks and youth–while still hewing to 3rd Way bankster centrism. He should be a lock–at the very least should lock out any Bloomberg talk.
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In the event, “left” support for the corporate elite has no support outside the Village. But it does play well there!

Fourteen of the sixteen eighteen members have to agree or nothing happens.
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Fixed.

To be clear I think extending the cuts for the top is bad policy and chicken (feather) politics.
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Did you read the link jsfox?

And the country experiences decades of growth and prosperity after The New Deal and Great Society. The 1950s saw some of the highest taxes in our history–and some of our lowest unemployment. But then came raygunonmics and the “me generation”. And suddenly everybody were on their own. Sink or swim time. The rich began getting ever richer and the poor and working poor were left behind to fend for themselves. In the meantime, our nation is crumbling from the inside out. Everything from our roads to bridges; our schools to electrical grid. It is all falling apart and nobody sees any need to raise taxes to get this nation moving again. It is a hard truth, but one that will have to be faced sooner rather than later.

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If we are going to spread the pain evenly then all the so called ‘free’ trade agreements must be put on the table and revised to keep American jobs here in the US. These agreements have done more to destroy the American middle class than any advances in communications, satellite transmissions and automation. It does no good to cut social security benefits when jobs are being actively destroyed in this country so that ‘global’ businesses can have access to slave labor. Americans are caught between the Republican desire to gut the Middle class through outsourcing and the Democrats desire to replace every American citizen with an illegal alien.
This is where the pain is. Do not expect the American taxpayer to bailout any business that is trying to force American labor into third world status. The social contract between business and the taxpayers was destroyed with NAFTA. Both parties had a hand in that. Have Simpson and Bowles work a day on the manufacturing floor in Mexico and then have them come back and tell us how we need to do more with less.

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save you a lot!

Reminder: Dems tried to cut out the tax rebates we taxpayers already give to businesses who send US jobs overseas, but the gNOp senators blocked it – as usual.

Btw, to make your example up-to-date, they’d have to work on a Chinese or Bangladeshi factory floor: many factories in Mexico have shut down because the work has gone to places with even lower-cost labor.

“… and the Democrats desire to replace every American citizen with an illegal alien.” Besides being literally untrue, what you meant to say is also untrue.

Oh, by the way, Mr. Calabresi, I hope you still feel welcome here. We get “het up”, but we value your input – sorta.

Given that the Commission recommends cuts in Farm Subsidies, maybe we should prepare to watch the process carefully, lest we run into a problem such as ONION News documents:

In the Senate, meanwhile, efforts to repeal the subsidy have been held up by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), whose state now enjoys a median household income of $131 million.
“I’m not going to get into this silly debate about whether there are too many or too few soybeans,” said Grassley, standing chest-deep in the hulled oilseeds as he addressed the Iowa Soybean Association. “The bottom line is this subsidy protects good, honest soybean jobs from being shipped overseas, and unlike my opponents, I choose to stand with American workers.”
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-waistdeep-in-soybeans-after-30-trillion-far,18422/

Funny how bent all the liberals are over this article. No one wants to pay more. The middle class and the those that pay taxes have been paying more, if not DIRECTLY to the Federal Government then to the State Government due to the Feds mandating programs that the States must pay for.
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So, when you say that taxes have gone down, it’s really not true. The burden simply has been shifted to the States.
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The Mortgage interest deduction isn’t on the table. It won’t fly. The earned income credit surely has lot of fraud and needs to be fixed. Give it to Citizens that work, not illegal aliens. Gas tax? Get real. Cut the entitlements, the pensions, the wages of Federal workers.

Rule, I absolutely agree that NAFTA and the agreement that allowed China into the WTO, should not only be back on the table but should be reversed. These so called “free trade” agreements are a sham and have damaged the American middle class more than anything in the last 20 years.
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I am at a loss to explain the incentive that our government has to outsource good paying jobs to slave labor countries. Both parties are guilty and I hope that we have thrown enough of them out to fix this travesty. And yes Herby, Democrats and Rhinos are fighting to bring as many Mexican illiterate peasants here as possible and get them to vote for them. If they didn’t want the scenario that we have, (a broken immigration policy as they love to call it) they could have fixed it years ago, many years ago. The fact is, politicians want it this way. It’s like all the other problems that they will tell you that they will fix, and then once elected nothing happens. WHY??? Because they don’t want it to change. This BS has gone on for the last 30 years. Broken schools, oh they will fix them, massive national debt, oh YEAH they will it. Taxes, they aren’t into fixing the high tax rate. If anything gets done, it will be because PEOPLE have forced these clowns to do something.
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Politicians F**k things up. They never fix anything. All they care about is power, getting re-elected, and that includes the former god Barry Obama.

There are a lot of ways to cut our current spending and debt without further burdening the poorest of the poor. There is so much waste in govt programs, we could potentially get close to balancing the budget just by eliminating some of the more ridiculous expenditures.

Govt wastes more money than anyone else. For instance, there is a program in florida I believe that spends 200+ million annually for people to go around the swamp killing invasive species trees. (never mind the fact the trees have been in the ecosytem since the 1700′s and everything has already adapted to their presence)

There are literally thousands and thousands of insane little projects like this that rack up Billions. Freeze Congressional Salaries for a few years, and get rid of a lot of these nonsensical govt waste programs as well as bloated govt offices and reign in all govt spending, and the budget would be balanced without touching the people’s cash.

Govt is now too large and too money hungry to be sustainable in it’s current form. Govt excess and waste is the prevailing problem in the US today.

we could potentially get close to balancing the budget just by eliminating some of the more ridiculous expenditures.

Ridiculous. You would need to cut about $1 trillion to close the budget deficit and that’s not coming from government waste. Your premise is entirely flawed. Reducing waste would help, but it would be nowhere near enough to close the gap.

Govt excess and waste is the prevailing problem in the US today.

With a longstanding high rate of unemployment and underemployment creating massive problems for millions of Americans you think government waste is the problem? Absolutely preposterous.