Budgets, defecits, and Fender Jaguars

At Swing City Music in Edwardsville, they're selling a mexican-made strat and a jag (both used) for something like $350 each. The reason people say they would kill for money, is because killing seems like it would be pretty easy, pragmatically speaking, to do. Getting away with it, sleeping at night, living with yourself, those are all the punishments after the fact. The deferred costs.

People who know me know that I pay attention to politics. People who know me on facebook know that commenting on political articles is as irresistible as crack to a fiend or free food to me.

So, to repost:
From the Christian Science Monitor:
"Bending to party conservatives – notably tea partiers – House GOP leaders propose steep cuts in many popular programs for the rest of the fiscal year. Will it lead to a government shut-down?"
And, from Brian Woodrum:
"While I know that budget cuts are needed, way to be idiots Republicans and propose cuts to those things that will just put us further behind all the other developed countries. America is quickly racing to the bottom."
And, from myself:

‎100 billion dollars is nothing. The Federal government spent 3500 billion dollars and took in 2100 billion in 2010, a 1400 billion dollar deficit, meaning republicans' "deep cuts" fail to even close 10% of the gap and are mostly targeted at things republicans don't like but that are shown to be good investments (family planning, education, etc). Also, loans and aid to other countries is less than one percent of the government's spending. The budget cuts need to look something like: 1-300 billion in military spending cuts. 2-500 billion in cuts to Medicare and social security and maybe 50 billion in cuts in discretionary spending. Restarting of the estate tax, expiration of bush tax cuts, reinstatement of Clinton-era income and capital gains taxes and an additional $1m+ tax bracket. That series of cuts and tax increases would be enough to balance the budget eventually. No one is proposing anything like that and no one will.

Just to source a bit more rigorously, all of this information can be easily accessed (including useful lists of just which programs you'd really like to see chopped) at wikipedia. Moreover, the CBO tables 01-09 (in PDF form) are available. In all, I'm sympathetic to the position that much of the deficit can be blamed on the 01-09 congress's inability to say no to George Bush's hyperinflative agenda. Meanwhile, the financial crisis of 2007 to the present has really made it basically impossible to realistically make the deficit a priority because deficit reduction cannot really be accomplished through spending cuts and spending cuts combined with tax increases is deflationary and counteractive to economic growth. It's my opinion that the actions of the federal reserve (all that money printing that people got so angry about) and the stimulative acts of the congress were enough to keep a serious depression at bay, but I don't believe the economy is strong enough at this point to withstand serious deflationary pressure from the government (to the tune of the $1,000,000,000,000 that would be necessary to make substantial, immediate progress against the deficit), and while you can make really scary drawings like, this one if you just extrapolate a yearly trend out to infinity, you can't extrapolate a yearly trend out to infinity, and once the unemployment rate and continuing banking problems have been dealt with, government should be able to be deflated without catastrophic effects to the economy.

We can't kill anyone to just make this go away. The short term solution is that there is no short term solution.