Krugman Exposes Fake Deficit Reduction Clowns

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Non-defense discretionary spending is only a small sliver of the federal budget and it has not been growing as fast as other areas of the budget. So where have the deficit hawks from both parties concentrated their budget cutting? You guessed it.

The fastest growing part of the federal budget is healthcare. There are good examples of plans to cut healthcare costs. Do you know where they are? You may have guessed it but probably not. They are in the current healthcare reform bill that the GOP wants to repeal. Why do they want to repeal it? Because they taught their base to hate it and they want to keep their base happy in the next election cycle. Paul Ryan has a healthcare plan that passes increases in healthcare costs on to Medicare beneficiaries rather than reducing the cost of healthcare. Although he is the current GOP luminary on budget issues the GOP won't tough Medicare because thats the most important area to work on deficits but not the most area to win votes.

The current healthcare reform bill contains several methods of lowering the price of healthcare services. If you did not guess this, its not your fault. The administration has done a poor job of explaining the bill to the public and the GOP has done a better job of telling the public lies about the bill that their base wants to believe.

The other two problems with the fake deficit reduction crowd is that they conflate healthcare with social security by referring to entitlement reform. They are are not serious about taking on meaningful reduction in healthcare expense growth but the GOP would love to privatize social security. They will huff and puff about entitlements but their real goal is the privatization of social security. Bush has stated that his biggest disappointment was his inability to privatize social security. This will always be on the GOP agenda because the potential benefits to Wall Street are very high.

Krugman also reminds us that a budget deficit occurs when federal spending is greater than federal tax revenues. The GOP wants to cut taxes by extending the Bush tax cuts. Their approach is focused almost entirely on spending cuts. The Obama administration has also proposed cuts in discretionary spending to keep the GOP from owning the deficit reduction crown. There are no proposals to raise taxes to fund services that the American public likes but does not want to pay for.