Spending Cuts

If you think that $60 billion in cuts is a lot, the Cato Institute is recommending $400-500 billion. I think they are being too moderate, particularly with national defense. The question we need to ask here is how much money we need to build the kind of military that would make it foolish for another country to invade us. The idea here is that we should be able to hold any country or likely alliance of countries to a stalemate until we were able to build up the forces necessary to repel them. By keeping spending modest and enabling our economy to grow, we will be giving our country the best possible defense from any future challenges we face.

The Cato Institute didn't consider cutting entitlements nearly enough. We need to start means testing Social Security and Medicare benefits, start raising the retirement age and have it automatically adjust based on life expectancy as well as tying benefit growth to inflation instead of wages as they recommend.

Their ideas about eliminating subsidies in agriculture, education, housing, transportation and energy are all good ideas and should be implemented as well as the changes that I have suggested. Of course we should end the federal war on drugs. The states will be able to set whatever policy they want in this area. If we have a deficit of over $1.6 trillion we need to get serious about cutting spending. Clearly the Cato Institute deserves praise for taking these issues more seriously than Congress or the President, but I don't think they are going quite far enough.