A recent Pew Research Center survey of Americans’ attitudes about reducing the federal budget found a significant majority of us want to increase spending on Medicare and education. About half of us want increased spending for defense and the unemployed. The majority of us also want no increase in our taxes. When you add up all of what we want it’s also clear what we don’t want — reality.
As a result, we and our leaders have suckered ourselves into a vicious cycle of denial about what it really takes to cut deficits, a cycle that is swirling us ever faster around the national drain. We punish politicians for telling us the ugly truth, so they fail to tell us the ugly truth. Then we don’t hear the ugly truth from enough of our political leaders to start accepting it and support efforts to address it.
That cycle must be broken and there are some in politics and elsewhere who are trying. Last November President Obama’s bipartisan Fiscal Commission released its co-chairs’ recommendations for eliminating the federal budget deficit over the next 10 years. It tackled defense spending, Medicare, Social Security, subsidies we all get from the government in the forms of mortgage and health insurance premium tax breaks and much more. The recommendations were so tough that a majority of the commission’s political members ran for cover while talking about less painful options.
For more: It’s time to stop deceiving ourselves about the budget — Maine Opinion — Bangor Daily News
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