Easy Breezy

The Center for American Progress has a new interactive tool that allows you to try and cut $100 billion from the federal budget. From someone who has actually worked on government budgets, it's actually not that easy to cut a program once it gets enacted and proves effective and popular with the public. I know, I know, Republicans-- now that they are the minority-- make it sound like it's so easy to slash $100 billion. In reality, it's not as easy as the deficit frauds are making it sound.

As the Center makes note, you can't touch mandatory or defense spending. So you have to make your cuts in non-defense discretionary related areas. Why? Well, because Republicans claim that's how they'll do it.  Non-defense discretionary spending makes up about 15% of the total budget, about $530 billion.  So your goal is to cut 19% from non-defense discretionary spending.

What is non-defense discretionary spending?  Oh it's just little things like education, veteran's benefits, transportation, law enforcement.  You know, nothing major.

As you'll discover, that's a lot of cutting.  It's so difficult and so problematic Republicans have already decided they can't do it.  They've instead decided on $60 billion in cuts.  You'll find out too $60 billion is a lot.

What I did was 10% across the board cuts on everything except for Natural Resources.  There I completely defunded the EPA.  That's a Republican pipe dream along with phasing out Social Security.  Since we can't touch Social Security this term, maybe I'll get to during the next Permanent Majority.  In all, my deficit slashing skills resulted in $65 billion in cuts!

It was tons of fun too slashing budgets without a care at all that my $65 billion in cuts would most likely result in millions of people losing their jobs.  Now if they could just build a tool that would give you a million extra unemployed on top of our 10% that already are, and let you figure out ways to pay them unemployment benefits, pay their medical, retrain them and/or help pay to send them back to school and still be able to keep your $65 billion in cuts it would be even funner!!