What Will We Cut?

If you add up all the money of all the billionaires in the United States, you’d get something like $8.2 trillion. If you look at what the government intends to spend this year, it’ll be about $7.4 trillion.

No one outside the far radical Left wants to confiscate all the billionaires’ money. The mainstream Left just wants to take some of it.

Put another way, if the Left got their way and had a wealth tax and increases in income taxes, we still would not generate enough tax revenue to equal what the government will spend this year. In fact, over the last twenty years, the amount of revenue the government has brought in, with taxes going up and down, has only fluctuated about five percent.

If the Democrats got their way and drove taxes up to seventy percent, we’d see wealth flee the United States, and the estimated revenue projections would never come in. This is not a debatable point.

So that raises the question: what are we going to cut?

The government cannot cut interest payments on the national debt.

The government actually needs to increase defense spending.

The biggest bit of the budget is the mandatory spending Congress does not touch for Social Security and Medicare. By 2032, Social Security payments will automatically be cut.

What else will be cut?

We have a bipartisan problem. Democrats want to raise taxes and cut defense spending, but increase social welfare spending. Republicans want to cut taxes to stimulate the economy, but Republicans spend as badly or worse than the Democrats.

Yesterday, on CNBC, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said the United States could grow its way out of the national debt problem. But this Administration has strangled the private sector economy with an onerous tariff regime that is difficult to navigate, lobbyist shaped, and most burdensome to the middle class and poor due to where all the exemptions on tariffs fall.

This Administration has also raised gas prices, which will have spillover effects on groceries and other aspects of the cost of living. So yes, we could grow our way out of the problem, but growth has averaged 2% or less the last few years and Donald Trump is committed to the economic policies of 1950’s Democrats that led to recessions.

So what are we going to cut?

The answer, I’m afraid, is nothing and then everything. The fiscal cliff approaches and it will be the biggest economic setback this country has seen since the Great Depression. It will be a bipartisan disaster and the politics of tomorrow are going to be even crazier than today.

On the Left and Right, socialists are rising. Both want to impose their view of the “common good” on you and your family through empowering unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. I am beginning to believe they all want the fiscal crisis to come so they can try to reshape the country in their image.

Buckle up. Neither side wants to let the crisis go to waste, so the crisis must come. The GOP could offer an alternative vision to the Democrats’ socialism, but the loudest voices in the GOP these days want socialism-lite. To quote Rush Limbaugh, “You can’t beat Democrats with Democrat-Lite,” but that’s where the GOP seems to be headed with the Vice President taking over MAGA.

Someone needs to chart a new course. In the 1970’s, both sides had decided the nation was in decline and Ronald Reagan chose to chart a different path and refuse to accept the idea of decline or detente. We are back again with both sides presuming our decline and China’s rise. The present leadership of both parties is failing us, and their vision for tomorrow involves giving them more power, insisting we can trust them to make right what they have made wrong.

Hopefully, between now and 2028, someone will emerge on the right who offers something other than the Diet Coke of Democrats, because you can’t beat the real thing.