Congress and the president need to pay the price for their ineptness. It was last year’s Congress that was responsible, by law, for producing a federal budget. The current House has a very limited ability to do much other than propose a budget and they have. The last Congress punted this role and wa
s not even chastised by our president for its complete lack of accountability.
It is now April and we still do not have a budget. Any CEO would be fired for such complacency. What is the hold up? They are arguing over a reduction of up to $60-plus billion. Do the math here, folks, this amount is nearly a rounding error in the vast sums of money in the average federal budget. We the people have been cutting a much higher percentage of our annual budgets for the past four years, while government expenditures have skyrocketed.
There is a very simple bottom line here, people: When you run out of other people’s money, you are unable to pay for all the social programs and safety nets. It is fast coming to the point where the decision to make cuts in the budget for these expenditures is no longer a choice. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and defense make up over 70 percent of our overall budget. The other 30 percent is loosely defined as discretionary. For the amount we need to cut to save this great country — we need to not only slash the 30 percent but also dig deeply into the 70 percent as well. This is not a choice, it’s a requirement.
Rep. Paul Ryan has it dead on — we need to discuss cuts in the trillions, not billions.
Don Thompson
Lake Stevens
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