Paul Ryan is a Very Serious Person. Last year, he released his Very Serious budget that did little more than eliminate medicare. The public reaction? Agree with him or not, he should be praised for his Very Serious attempt at deficit reduction. But it wasn’t serious at all! And today, we have another Very Serious Budget. What does it say?
Well, for starters, defense spending. It’s awesome. We should never, ever, ever cut it. Taxes? Not so awesome, cut them. Medicare? Ditto. So how then can we balance the budget? Well, by cutting domestic spending by about 80%. So Serious!
On taxes, Ryan Very Seriously promises us “pro-growth tax reform”. It’s pro-growth! Yay! So how will he do that? Eliminate some deductions! Which ones? We don’t know. Ryan has been praised for making hard choices, but he hasn’t made any choices at all! Actually telling people, honestly, that you intend to cut their favorite deductions or benefits is one thing. Just saying “pro-growth” a lot is entirely another. The details matter, and the Very Serious Ryan doesn’t have any.
So, can we please stop pretending that we care about deficits? We have them because not having them would mean cuts to programs people like. That, in turn, means electoral defeat. Politicians don’t cut the deficit because if they did, we would kick them out. We have deficits because we don’t want to choose one program over another. We have deficits because we want them, and yet we expect our politicians to play this Very Serious game year after year, because we pretend that we care about deficits. But we get the government that we want.
So let’s all just stop bullshitting each other, shall we? We distract ourselves with these budget fights, but they obscure the very real issues we should be dealing with instead.
520 Chestnut 
Just look at the actual spending reports for the year and it’s easy to see where the money comes from, and where it goes. Each year, the interest on the debt is a major source of spending, but they rarely talk about that aspect. Huge portions of the debt are from the Social Security program. Not because the program is broken. It’s actually one of the few government programs that works better than imagined. The Social Security trust fund is constantly raided to fund other budget holes. Those funds, which were intended to generate interest and support the program as population growth was experienced, were spent on everything from FOUR foreign wars, to missile defense shields, to tax cuts for the wealthy.
So a major portion of the deficit spending is replacing the money we took from ourselves, and then paying the interest on the debt that we borrowed from ourselves. Amazing how they believe we can cut our way out of that type of cycle when they cannot keep their hands out of the proverbial “cookie jar”.
“So a major portion of the deficit spending is replacing the money we took from ourselves, and then paying the interest on the debt that we borrowed from ourselves.”
You know, thats one of those things that I know is true, and yet hearing it still just manages to make you cringe a little. Its all a game.