things progressives would like to see cut: a sprawling defense budget that funds two wars and hundreds of military bases world-wide; a criminal justice system that spends billions to lock up millions of (too often black) Americans; and corporate welfare in the form of subsidies for oil and gas companies, and for industrial agriculture.
Harmful government spending is a much bigger problem than wasteful government spending.
Positive social spending is all too scarce, and constantly under pressure.
Tea Party claims to be “tough on the deficit” while spending billions on war, prisons and corporate welfare.
Authentic libertarians do not have a major presence in the Republican Party.
Ron Paul, a critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the drug war, was marginalized within the Republican Party.
says Dave Weigel, a writer for Slate who chronicles the conservative movement. “Anyone who comes out and says 'This is a wasteful program we can get rid' of will get the attention of these new members of Congress.”
- 1. War and the Defense Budget
Pentagon’s global operations and two ongoing wars take up at least one-fifth of the federal budget
Democrats to challenge Obama’s troop buildup in Afghanistan
downsizing the Pentagon, defunding the American empire
It took years to kill the F-22 jet, whose production Lockheed Martin had ingeniously spread across 46 states to ensure political support.
“The populist insurgents seem to have been relatively silent when it comes to dead-end American foreign policy and the high costs in blood and treasure of the never-ending U.S. global interventionism.”
In 2008, economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes made a “conservative estimate” that the Iraq war would cost the U.S. $3 trillion over the long haul.
When it comes to the preamble of the Constitution’s charge to “provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare,” the Republican Study Committee really gives the latter short shrift.
“Unfortunately, these cuts may not occur due to resistance from neoconservative Republicans. That’s right – many of the same people who made deficit reduction a signature issue on the campaign trail are unwilling to even consider cutting the largest source of our deficits.”
- 2. Immigration Reform
Numbers on how much it costs to deport an immigrant just came out: $12,500 per immigrant, which added up to $5 billion last year. That would be $137 billion to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants. Immigrant rights advocates have cleverly labeled this spending a “deportation tax.”
- 3. Criminal Justice and the Prison-Industrial Complex
Budget deficits at the federal, state and local level are forcing politicians to take a fresh look at the $69-billion-a-year cost of locking so many people up.
- 4. Corporate Welfare in Five Acts
- Cut subsidies for oil and gas companies:
Obama has made getting rid of $4 billion in subsidies and tax breaks to oil and natural gas companies
- Get rid of farm subsidies for millionaire “farmers”
61 percent of agricultural subsidies go to the wealthiest 10 percent of farmers, mainly for farming corn, cotton, soybeans and wheat. Not to small farmers raising, say, vegetables
it’s a subsidy for the raw materials for highly processed foods that make our country sick and obese.
- Reform or abolish the mortgage interest deduction (MID):
disproportionately benefits the rich, in two ways: first, while the wealthy usually take itemized deductions, most poorer people just take the standard deduction. second, people with the highest marginal tax rates and the most expensive mortgages get the biggest deductions. And renters get no benefit whatsoever. It costs the government $131 billion a year.
- End the tax break for hedge fund managers:
Because of the creative exploitation of a tax loophole, extremely rich hedge fund managers are able to count their earnings as capital gains instead of income, which means they are taxed at just 15 percent instead of the much higher rate of 35 percent that the regular super-rich non-Wall Street people pay on the money they make. This means that fund mangers pay taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries
- Allow Medicare to negotiate drug discounts the way the VA does:
If Medicare were allowed to negotiate bulk drug prices for participants in Part D,
“If Medicaid and Medicare paid the same as Australia or Canada, or even the VA, you could save tens of billions of dollars a year,”
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) threw its weight behind health-care reform after the guarantee to block efforts to allow for negotiation-
it’s not clear why the government negotiating bulk discounts would run counter to free market principals. Any business making such a large purchase would do the same.
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