When you start looking at how budget crises affect government operations, you enter a real rabbit hole, I tells ya. Yes, everyone agrees, we're spending too much money in the public sector and something's gotta give. But what? Don't you see that every goddman thing the government at all levels does is so essential that, really, when you start to look at it, absolutely nothing can be cut?
In fact, when you look at the 60 percent increase in total federal outlays (in constant 2010 dollars or 104 percent in 2000 dollars) since Bill Clinton left office, the real question becomes: How the hell did we ever get by as a country without all that extra crap that's been around for a decade or less? My memory is fading, but in the surplus year of 2000, didn't we all live in old washing-machine boxes and prepare holiday dinners by cutting pictures of food out of grocery-store circulars? Sure, we were poor (by which I mean unprecedentedly wealthy) but at least we had each other (by which I mean the Internets).
No wonder that the good war-happy people at AEI are bitching and moaning that we oughta crank up defense spending from its puny 4.9 percent of GDP to an Eisenhowerian 10+ percent? More guns, less butter! Then there's John Podesta, former Clinton admin chief of staff and now head of the liberal Center for American Progress, fretting that trimming $255 billion from a 2015 budget coming in at over $4 trillion would "do lasting harm to the health of the American middle class." More butter (or cholesterol-free equivalent) and about the same amount of guns!
The rest here.
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