He's raising the taxes for the rich. http://www.smartmoney.com/Personal-Finance/Taxes/Brace-Yourself-for-a-Bigger-Tax-Bill/
The alternative to raising taxes is to cut about $800B from the annual federal budget. Call it $3T in spending cuts over the presidential term. Would be interested in hearing precisely where the ET community would wield the knife, and how they would plan to sell it to the electorate.
If they actaully reduced spending, even $400B, I would gladly pay more tax for several years to reduce the debt.
you cant reduce the spending, think about the children. they will suffer. The kids will have to go without cellphones, cable TV, new brothers and sisters and all sorts of other stuff in the name of allowing those that are productive to keep what they earn. It is time for change, time to spread the wealth, time for socialism in america to be given a chance. We can start with our elected officials listening to people who say our 401Ks and IRAs should be confiscated by the govt. http://www.carolinajournal.com/articles/display_story.html?id=5081 Amerika will be land of happy people where we will all be equal without the labels of rich or poor if we just have the government 'help' us get there. God bless the USSA. (its still legal to say 'god' right??)
The vast majority of government spending is tied up in human capitol. The main goal of government organizations is to get more people, which equates to more budget, which equates to career advancement. I have yet to see a government employee get promoted for reducing budgets. Also, once you hire a government worker, you cannot fire or lay them off unless they break a law. The only way you can get rid of one is to promote them out. Even if the program is canceled or their office closed you must find a place for them to go to within the government. The only real place to cut government spending is by reducing the contractor workforce. That is also hard to do since the majority of the productivity and thought leadership comes from the contractors. They actually have to produce and work for a living and can be fired/layed off. the only real way to reduce the size of government in a meaningful way is take an agency and reduce its budget so much that they have no choice but to remove all contractors and then keep cutting budget until civil servants are let go. Of course the government would have to change policy requiring the government to move "layed off" civil servants to another agency or program when theirs is canceled. The catch 22 is that if you cut to that level the agency is no longer functional since the productive members (contractors) are gone and chances are the productive civil servants will be the first ones to go from the government. Either way the US is fucked regardless of which party holds the executive and legislative branches.
Wow, I know you are only being facetious here (or sarcastic) so why do I still want to throw up thinking about a USA like this?
Defense spending needs to be brought in line with that of other developed countries. This will require a 70% reduction in defense budget, with much of that money diverted into infrastructure with defense contractors retooling to build infrastructure instead of advanced weapons. The country should construct a national, high-speed rail system, as this is the most energy efficient way to quickly move goods and people, and will be a major contributor to achieving energy independence. All new cars should be required to run on natural gas and a tax credit be available for conversion of existing cars and service stations to natural gas. This is not the final solution but a useful interim one that can be done quickly. Home land security budget should also get the axe. We can achieve a reasonable level of safety from terrorist acts far more efficiently. Drugs need to be decriminalized and treated as a social and medical problem, as it is in other developed nations. That can save many billions when you combine the savings from, interdiction and the "war on drugs" and a roughly 80% reduction in the crime rate and huge reduction in prison costs, court, legal and police costs. Runaway medical costs need to be brought down by deregulating medicine and introducing competition and capitalist principles to what is now a government-private sector cartel. Social security is trivial to fix. Spending on education, research and technology needs to be increased. Manned missions into space need to be halted for now and all efforts diverted to unmanned scientific missions for which the cost/benefit ratio is far lower. Some of the money saved should be diverted to a glitzy advertising campaign aimed at convincing primary and secondary school students that education is Kool!