I believe any thinking American would agree that our government spends too much money. These days Washington is just out of control, period. The question today isn't "SHOULD we cut spending?" but "WHAT should we cut?"
Republicans want to cut back on all the social programs on the books, but they'll fight tooth and nail to protect the loopholes granted to their business special interest buddies. Not surprisingly, the Democrats want to do just the opposite. Both parties want to balance the budget on the other guy's back.
Here's my idea: Do we even know the dollar value of all the tax loopholes, subsidies, "favors", etc that are liberally sprinkled all through our 75,000 page(?) tax code and various other "back door" appropriations? I suggest we commission someone (the GAO?...maybe a Big 6 accounting firm?) to go through everything page-by-page, identify each, put a dollar value on each, explain how each is justified, and how it would affect the economy/taxpayers if it went away. We know about some of the high profile ones such as subsidies for the oil companies, big pharma, etc, but we tend to forget things like home mortgage interest deductions and union dues deductions. I wanna know about ALL of 'em. How much do you think they would add up to? $100 billion a year? $500 billion a year? A TRILLION dollars a year?
Do any politicians have the guts to propose something like this? No...didn't think so. They all have their special interests they're covering for, and the LAST thing the special interests want is for the people to find out how badly they're getting screwed.
I'll bet it would be a real eye opener. Then I bet we could make a helluva dent in our deficit!
S
