In todays NYT's
The $17 billion would be saved through terminating or reducing 121 federal programs, ranging from just $632,000 to eliminate the post of an attaché for the Education Department in the American embassy in Paris to $142 million for cleaning up abandoned mines. But the mines money illustrates the difficulties the administration could face in Congress, where, as administration officials acknowledged, every program has its patrons. When Mr. Obama proposed cuts in the program as part of his budget outline, Western state lawmakers objected.
“None of this is going to be easy,” said Peter R. Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
That is certainly true, it is already clear, for the roughly half of the savings that administration officials say will come from defense programs. Those savings proposals are mostly known, having been outlined in April by Robert M. Gates, the secretary of defense, as part of a comprehensive re-ordering of military spending priorities – to the howls of supporters in Congress and the defense industry.
Among Mr. Gates’ targets are missile defense programs, the Army’s costly Future Combat Systems, Navy shipbuilding, the advanced F-22 fighter jets and a state-of-the-art helicopter fleet for the president.
“This is a product of going through the budget line-by-line,” as Mr. Obama promised since his presidential campaign, said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. “It’s a constant, cumulative effort on this front to find savings and find reductions.”
Conservatives will spin this and say how small it is compared to budget, and how big the long term deficits are. But this is a clever chess move that no one needs take seriously. The long term deficits are about health care spending that is out of control. Remember: Obama is not the problem... underfunded government and a heath care crisis are...
As I've mentioned before go see what would happen if we are able to align our health care costs with the rest of the industrialized world, you need to check out the Center for Economic and Policy Research's Health Care Budget Deficit Calculator which, "allows you to see what the projected U.S. budget deficit would be, as a percentage of GDP, if the United States had the same per person health care costs as any of the countries in the list below, all of which enjoy longer life expectancies than the United States."
For more on how you can help get health care reform join me in standing with Dr. Dean. So that we can assure that individual Americans can choose either a universally available public healthcare option like Medicare or for-profit private insurance. A public health care option brings competition into the marketplace without it we will continue to pay 2 to 3 times as much for health care as other industrialized nations (while leaving large chunks of our population without coverage a.k.a "rationing" via income).
To see where we're at as a nation compared to the rest of the world go check out the graph on spending per capita ("the cost of long life"). Off the charts would be an understatement...
No comments:
Post a Comment