By having a go at this interactive site hosted by the Program (sic) for Public Consultation, "a newly-established joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland".
I started off by zero-ing anything that the founding fathers would not have deemed appropriate, and that left me with a $62bn budget deficit. A 10% cut in the military budget would have balanced the books completely. Thereafter I decided I did not think much of the tax algorithms in that there was no scope, anywhere, to cut taxes in order to increase the overall rake. Paging Arthur Laffer....
See how you do.
I reckon that most of those "programmes" if at all necessary would be better suited to state or more local decision-making and therefore I reduced everything that wasn't defence or law enforcement to zero. I cut the CIA by about 40%, withdrew troops and development money from everywhere and cut the main defence budget by about a third.
ReplyDeleteThen I introduced a federal VAT.
Unfortunately I was not allowed to cut income and corporate taxes and so I ran a surplus of $346.5bn...
Now if you and I can work that out....
ReplyDeleteI will admit to being astonished at how much money goes on veterans' benefits etc.
I think US federal spending is set by people like Ed Balls. Remember how hacked off people got with the NHS "heat maps"? In the US they are quite open about buying votes in congress!
ReplyDelete