Spending
Almost everyone, except perhaps those on the far left, realizes that federal spending needs to be cut. However, just about everyone wants everything else to be cut but not their programs.
Our national debt has now reached an astounding, humanly incomprehensible level of more than $18 trillion dollars.
Several other countries and even several cities in the U.S. have recently been forced to reduce or cut the pensions that have been promised to government employees or individual citizens.
Many of my constituents who are counting on social security or government or military pensions in the years ahead are demanding much more fiscal conservatism from government officials.
The easiest thing in the world is to spend other people’s money. Almost every city or state that has had liberal or left-wing leadership for most of the last 40 or 50 years is in financial trouble. People all over the country are moving from the high tax states to the low tax states.
Almost all interest groups and federal agencies greatly exaggerate the problems with which they are dealing so they can get more money and power.
Today, huge amounts of federal money are going not only to federal employees and contractors, but also to state and local governments, doctors, hospitals, universities and their students, National Guard and reserve units, schools, farmers, and on and on.
We are now borrowing around half of every dollar the federal government spends.
The only fair way to actually cut federal spending would be to do across-the-board cuts with the same percentage for everyone.
Since this will not be done unless the Congress becomes much more fiscally-conservative, most people think we are headed very quickly toward the same financial problems as Greece, only on a much larger scale.