| A lot of it has to do with the "PAYGO" rules - Pay As You Go. Somebody in DC decided that the deficit is a huge problem. And somebody also decided that we will deal with it by spending very little on government. If we increase spending somewhere, we have to offset it with cuts somewhere else. Within a committee like the House Education and Labor Committee or the Senate Agriculture Committee - the two committees responsible for the child nutrition bill - they can only take from certain programs to give money to school lunch. The Senate took money from agriculture conservation programs. The House hasn't told us yet (to my knowledge) where they will find the money, but it could be farm subsidies, conservation, or something else agriculture-related like that. It won't be (and CAN'T be if I understand things correctly) things outside of the committee's jurisdiction - like taxing rich people or cutting outdated Cold War weapons programs from the bloated Pentagon budget.
There are two problems here. One is that we waste a lot of money on the friggin' bloated Pentagon budget and we have low tax revenues because rich people and corporations don't pay their fair share. And I particularly mean that toward the hedge fund managers who make millions but get taxed at 15% because their income is all technically "capital gains." The Dems aren't messing with that one because a lot of their big donors are among the millionaires getting taxed at 15%. And there's a lobbyist (or several) for every single line in the budget, so it's hard to cut things, even outdated weapons programs. Recall the F-22 Fighter Jet.
The second problem is that PAYGO means that in addition to wasting money in some areas (or forfeiting it via low tax rates), we can't spend money in areas where we need to spend money. It would be great if PAYGO was set up to take money away from outdated Cold War weapons programs or oil subsidies and such to give it to school lunch, but it's not. Instead it has the effect of keeping well-meaning and progressive legislators from putting money into needed places like school lunch unless they take it from other needed places like conservation. And I'm all for changing our farm subsidies and using any savings to pay for school lunches, but we're not passing the farm bill until 2012, so we can't really restructure the entire subsidy system now. All we can do is cut money from the current system in a way that leaves the system screwed up but probably hurts farmers.
So I have two questions. First, why do we need to focus on the deficit NOW? Classic Keynesian economics say that if there is ever a time to run up a deficit, it is during bad economic times (LIKE NOW). The government needs to inject money into the economy when the private sector can't. THEN we'll have a larger middle class, more employment, higher salaries... and a larger tax base, fewer entitlements to pay for and THEN we can cut the deficit.
Second, if we DO have to deal with the deficit ASAP, why is PAYGO the way we chose to cut the deficit? Seriously. Just tax the rich people. We all pay our dues into society. It's patriotic. We are benefiting from taxes paid by generations before us for the technology we have that came from government investment (like the internet), from the roads, from the court system, from all of that. And we benefit from the taxes we pay now as the government continues to create jobs, provide a social safety net, keep us safe, and pass and enforce laws to deal with a rapidly changing world. And rich people take more than poor people in benefits from our government - maybe not in the form of food stamp checks but in the form of the roads they use to ship goods, contracts to their companies, the court system that protects their intellectual property, etc. They do take more. And they should pay more. Their taxes have been going down since I was born (the day Reagan was elected in 1980) and it's time for their taxes to go up so we can have a middle class and a functioning society. And THAT could address the deficit without taking food out of the mouths of children by underfunding the school lunch program. |
