It can't go on like this. The country has just got to do something about deficit spending.
So let's get rid of a whole lot of government.
Let's eliminate the National Park Service.
Let's get rid of the FBI. And the Border Patrol, the DEA and the ATF.
Let's abolish the entire Labor and the Commerce departments.
Bye, bye, Internal Revenue Service. Buzz off, NASA. Pull the plug, public television.
The Environmental Protection Agency has got to go. So long, Centers for Disease Control.
Not to mention the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and a bunch of other regulators.
In fact, let's abolish the entire civilian side of the U.S. government.
To hear some people tell it, getting rid of the government would solve all of our problems, but there is one little problem it wouldn't solve: There would still be a deficit!
You heard right.
Erase all of the civilian functions of the federal government that people normally think of as "the government" - and the deficits would continue to pile up.
The operating departments of government draw funds from a budget category called nondefense discretionary spending.
In 2010, total spending from that category was $614 billion. The deficit was $1,294 billion. Do the math. Without any domestic discretionary spending whatsoever in 2010, the country still would have piled up a deficit of $680 billion.
Who are the president and members of Congress trying to fool when they tinker around the edges of domestic discretionary spending and claim to be addressing the deficit?
They are either willfully obtuse or disingenuous. The budget will never be balanced by freezing or cutting domestic discretionary spending alone.
The two other categories of spending - defense ($689 billion in 2010) and mandatory spending ($1,910 billion) - account for more than 80 percent of federal spending.
Yet even the most ardent deficit hawk is afraid to propose cuts in defense or mandatory spending. Defense is sacrosanct, and mandatory spending includes popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare, as well as interest payments on the national debt.
The numbers make it clear that Congress can never cut its way to a balanced budget by leaving 80 percent of federal spending off the chopping block.
In theory, it might be possible to eliminate the deficit by freezing both domestic and military spending, then waiting for the natural growth in revenue, through economic growth, to gradually close the gap between what the government spends and takes in.
In the real world, a total freeze is impractical. Moreover, natural increases in revenue might never close the gap because one category of mandatory spending is increasing even faster.
That would be health care. Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' health care. In large measure, the deficit problem is not so much a government-spending problem as it is a health-care-cost problem. (It's also a problem of having cut taxes too much and launched two wars with no provision to pay for them, but that's another story.)
Until the deficit-hawks are willing to do something about the staggering increases in the cost of health care, all the sound and fury over cutting domestic discretionary spending is showmanship, not deficit reduction.
