The Budgetary Circular Firing Squad

Okay, I'm a little confused, here. We just passed a huge stimulus bill that contained lots of spending and tax cuts to prime the economy. This was an emergency and was rushed through in order to save the country from certain DOOOOOOM! Now Obama is saying that he's going to reduce the deficit and cut spending in the Federal budget. Um... won't that counteract the effects of the stimulus bill? If we increase Federal spending and then immediately decrease Federal spending, what was the point?

Obama has stated that he wants to end the "casual dishonesty" in how the Federal government accounts for spending. While I would love to see that happen, I am eagerly waiting to hear how he's going to handle the fact that Social Security is a huge unfunded liability. The money that we pay into Social Security is spent by the Federal government and replaced with IOUs. It's one thing to take your money and put it into an investment or a bank. It's another to spend it yourself and then give yourself an IOU. The only way to pay out future Social Security obligations is to collect future taxes. If Obama really manages to address the issue of dishonest government accounting and brings sanity to Federal budgeting without wrecking the economy, I will be impressed.

He has also stated that he wants to reduce health care spending. Unfortunately, the only way to really do this is to reduce consumption. I know that he's said that he'll make health care spending more efficient, but that's just not going to happen. Even if he somehow managed to reduce waste in health care spending, all of the proposed improvements in health care include increased spending on preventative care. But more spending on preventative care actually increases health care costs. It also improves health and life expectancies. So I'm all for it, but it won't reduce costs. So I'm not sure how that's going to fit into his whole "reduce health care costs and the deficit" thing...

Of course, all of this assumes he can control Pelosi, Reid, and the Congressional Democrats...

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