Our Fiscal Dilemma

TW: Former Reagan and HW Bush economics advisor Bartlett gets some aggravation off his chest relative to our fiscal situation (I mean if I call folks "nitwits" I am accused of limo liberal snobbery!!). He covers ground we have covered mostly before here but it is always useful to hear an economist from the other side validate one's concerns. His fundamental point: folks have a very convoluted and inaccurate view of how the federal government spends money and how challenging efforts to bend the spending curve truly are given the political realities.

I have asked rhetorically many times on the blog: so what do YOU want to do? Raise taxes? Cut spending, if so where? Have yet to get a response.

From Bruce Bartlett at Capital Gains and Games and Forbes:
"Every time I try to explain why our fiscal problems are so deep that higher revenues must be considered, some nitwit always says to me, “Why don’t we just cut spending?” It’s as if the choice between raising taxes and cutting spending is no more difficult than the choice to buy melon or cantaloupe for breakfast. What these nitwits implicitly assume is that we live in some kind of dictatorship where Ron Paul has Stalin-like power and spending can be cut with the wave of a hand, where no one has to worry about getting the votes in Congress for politically painful legislation, where the budget largely consists entirely of foreign aid, where there are no entitlement programs or interest on the debt to pay, and where the primary beneficiaries of spending (the elderly) aren’t the largest and fastest growing voting bloc in America. In my Forbes column this week I try to explain some of the difficulties of cutting spending. I will have to revisit the topic because I only touched the surface. I expect the nitwits who think our fiscal problems can be solved solely and exclusively on the spending side to ignore me and continue to live in their dream world."
http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/17/federal-budget-spending-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html