Cut Spending: Just Don’t Cut THAT Spending

The GOP has a problem.  A recent poll of self-identified conservatives places them completely at odds with GOP talking points.

…Longtime conservative bugaboos like "foreign aid" and "welfare" score high marks. But other than that, no single proposal reaches even so much as 25% support for cuts among conservatives. And the next highest-scoring answer was something of a surprise: "war on terrorism." Well, I’ll be!

After that, the answers show extraordinarily low, and extremely disparate support for cutting anything else in particular, with no other sector or program even rising to 20% support for cuts. And remember, these are self-identified conservatives.

Foreign aid, of course, comprises only about 1% of the annual federal budget. Defining "welfare programs" for the purposes of assessing how much of the budget is spent on them, presents some problems. Are they all "entitlement programs?" That’d be a sizable budget chunk. But how to reconcile even that with the fact that while something like 35% of conservatives say they want to cut "welfare programs," less than 10% say they’d cut "aid to the poor?" And if "welfare programs" is to include all entitlements, you’re gonna have a problem with the extremely poor support among conservatives for cutting Social Security.

The bottom line is that conservatives — probably like most Americans — say they want at least some spending cut, but can’t cobble together any serious majorities in favor of cutting anything in particular. Even foreign aid comes in below 50%, not that slashing it would help save much money, anyway. And yet, whenever there have to be cuts, the bulk of them by necessity must be those which would be extremely unpopular even among conservatives.

The only answer to that is probably the only thing even less popular with conservatives than cutting these programs, and that’s taxes. And again, taxes are unpopular with pretty much anyone who has to pay them, though it’s also generally said to be the case that the more liberal end of the spectrum is more open to their necessity than the other side. (We’ll have to see if any data is ever produced that will one day call that assumption into question.)

But in lieu of actual answers, what you get from the discordant mewling of loudmouth teabaggers and other conservative screechers is: a collection of complaints about which they cannot even come to a consensus regarding the measure of their suckitude. "Cut… stuff!" is what you’d get if you had to synthesize a message from this mess. Which is not unlike what you’re you actually seeing saw from them today on Thursday, now that they’ve been invited to a summit meeting to share their ideas for health care reform.

Is this truly a party with a coherent philosophy, supposedly poised to wrest back control of the government? It’s often said that Republicans are far better at stating their basic beliefs than Democrats, and they usually do it by making reference to smaller government, lower spending and lower taxes. But the only consensus they’re able to produce for that even among themselves is for lower taxes. Which is kind of how we got where we are with the budget in the first place. And which leaves Republicans in truth as the party that stands for the explosion of the budget, which comes as no surprise to anyone who’s capable of remembering that Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus, wrung out of slaying the Reagan deficits.

Again, not unlike what’s what was on display at the summit today the other day. The Republican position on health care, like the Republican position on everything but taxes, is designed only to hold their base together on the fact that they’re angry about something, and want to beat Democrats at the polls in order to prove how angry they really are. What happens after that? Well, who gives a crap? Just cut my taxes… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Daily Kos>

The solution to the dilemma isn’t that difficult to figure out.  If we want to solve Social Security and Medicare shortfalls we can do so today, if we remove the cap and have the rich pay FICA on all their salaries, including obscene bonuses.  The GOP succeeded is skewing wealth so disproportionately that the bottom 40% of Americans own only 0.2% of the wealth.  The GOP has been redistributing wealth for years.  We can tax the rich to return some of that wealth to meet the needs of everyday Americans.  There is on danger that the GOP will beat us to the punch on that one.  They are too much in love with No Millionaire Left Behind.