Americans want Congress to bring the $1.4 trillion federal deficit under control -- but they don't want anyone touching their Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, entitlement programs that account for 40% of all spending. Nor, according to a new Bloomberg National Poll, do they favor drastic cuts in domestic or defense spending. And one more thing. Don't raise their taxes.
The public doesn't oppose all sacrifices -- as long as someone else is doing the sacrificing. Like the rich. Otherwise, the polling results are very bad news for anyone who expects public opinion to push Congress into making serious moves to balance the budget. Judging by the poll results, the electorate lives in a Cinderella world where Congressmen can sprinkle magic fairy dust on the federal budget and make the deficits shrink.
I share the middle-class anxiety about Social Security and Medicare cuts. I have paid payroll taxes all my life, and I've based my lifestyle and saving rate on the assumption that the money promised to me in that annual Social Security mailing will be honored. I'm counting on the two programs to account for roughly a third of my retirement income. Yes, I want to preserve the middle-class entitlements. Yes, I oppose raising tax rates. And, yes, I consider myself a deficit hawk.
Does that make me a hypocrite, as many progressive pundits insinuate? No, because I think it is possible to balance the budget without significantly cutting middle-class entitlements, or even entitlements for the poor.
As someone who gave up on becoming "rich" long ago, I do not believe that taxing the well-to-do is the solution. For one reason, we won't squeeze as much money out of them as people think. Rich people have too many ways to convert taxable income into non-taxable income. For another, the rich include don't all clip coupons; they include the entrepreneurs and small businessmen who create a majority of our country's new jobs.
What I would support is eviscerating the $1 trillion in tax exemptions, deductions, credits and other loopholes in our tax code, most of which happen to favor the wealthy, as well as the $100 billion or more funneled to corporate welfare. We could get a long way toward a balanced budget by targeting wealthy people who got wealthy by feeding at the government trough, and still reduce tax rates. Let's just be clear though: It's the feeding at the government trough part that I resent, not the being rich part.
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