Empty Promises on Fixing the Budget

On Election Day I discussed the 5 Most Important Issues for the New Congress. We are now three days post-election and we find ourselves now looking to what promises from the campaign trail will actually become a reality and if any of these promises will actually relate to any of my 5 Most Important. Number 1 on my list was the Economy in which I discussed promises which had been made to cut the deficit and reign in spending. I suggested that there are a “Big 3” for spending; Social Security, Medicare and Defense.

Aligning with one of my “Big 3” one of the main promises on the campaign trail from both the Democrats and the Republicans as well as the primary rally cry from the Tea Party was to reign in spending and cut into the deficit. However from these promises, there is no real substance with very little actual suggestions being made in regards to what will actually be cut. For many of these new Congressmen the stark reality of the differences between campaigning and actually doing the work will set in.

Promises are easy to make and difficult to keep. The consistent promise is to lower the deficit, but I ask how. For this argument I will disregard one of the few cuts that the Republican Party suggests, Health Care. The reason I choose to ignore this ‘cut’ is because the Health Care Act passed into law back in March actually decreases the deficit over the next 10 years. The Republican Party is trying to add substance to their empty idea bucket in efforts to gain public opinion by wrapping two different attacks together as if they were one, health care and the deficit.

Several media outlets have been trying to press our government leadership as to the exact ways in which they would lower the deficit. Some of the suggestions given to cut the budget have been;

• Return unused Stimulus Money - $190 Billion, although the Stimulus (depending on who you ask) has created job growth and boosted the economy, just not in the way it was hoped.
• Freeze federal pay - $50 Billion
• Cut Department of Education, Energy and other outdated programs - $40 Billion
• Extend the Bush Tax Cuts (differences on how this will affect the deficit differ, so I wont give official numbers for either side)
• Create gas tax of .10 per gallon - $80 Billion
• Cancel NASA missions to space - $40 Billion

Politicians will often rattle off a list of cuts such as these that I have presented, but as you can notice the impact into the federal budget is minimal. If cuts are to be made, serious consideration must be taken towards cutting into the “Big 3”

• Exiting Afghanistan due to the high cost of funding war in the Defense Budget. If out by 2015 - $680 Billion
• Raising the age of Social Security to 68 and creating a new alternate measure of inflation for cost of living. - $210 Billion
• Increasing cost sharing for Medicare and increasing premiums to 35% of cost. - $240 Billion

These “Big 3” will take the biggest chunk out of the Federal deficit. Despite many of these suggestions and many more of them being thrown into the mix, the commonality that follows each of these claims is, “work needs to be done on a bi-partisan level and I will have to look into it.” The only promise that is made is to lower the spending and cut into the budget. But looking at the examples that have been given, you can see what effect they will actually do in regards to decreasing the budget.

These promises that are being made mislead the American public into think that their Representatives actually have a plan, when in reality all they are doing is pushing to polls. A prime example of the misleading information that is being fed to the American public recently came from Michelle Bachmann, Congresswoman from Minnesota. Congresswoman Bachmann recently came out against a reported $200 million a day/$2 billion trip planned for President Obama to meet with the leadership in India (these figures have been disputed by the White House). Bachman claims that this is the government waste that must be put to an end. She went on to suggest that teleconferencing would be more cost effective. The problem with this claim isn’t the outrageous suggestion that Obama needs to teleconference with foreign leaders, but that she is leading the American public to believe that by cutting this $2 billion trip (again, these number are heavily disputed), the deficit will be fixed. If politicians continue to promise cuts but refuse to get serious about the significant chunks of our budget, nothing will get done.