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Midweek Recap—”What Entitlements Would You Be Willing To Cut…

by on Jun. 10, 2009, under Uncategorized

in order to control federal spending?  These are the highlights of the practical ** responses I received:

Close down federal facilities that aren’t adding value to the community

Have the public approve state and federal spending programs directly, through referendums, instead of having elected officials vote on them.

Apply FICA to all incomes—no cutoffs

Eliminate corporate tax loopholes

Make Medicare universal, by requiring everyone to join. 

Cut ALL foreign aid for one year

Cut retirement pay and Social Security by 20% for anyone who’s 45 or younger.

A clarification on what I mean by “entitlements.”  Basically, it’s anything that results in the Federal government sending you a check.  That means retirement pay, Social Security, GI Bill benefits—anything that results in a check. 

Several commenters have protested that they have earned these benefits.  I don’t disagree there.  But, the whole point is, the Federal government doesn’t have the money to pay for these benefits.  Right now, in order to pay its financial obligations, the US government is going further and further into debt.

Shouldn’t we all be willing to give up some of the benefits we’ve earned, so that our grandchildren won’t be broke?  We are, after all, the ones who spent gazillions of dollars we didn’t have.

Pretend that your elected leaders are listening.  Pretend this is your chance to give them constructive suggestions, ideas they can REALLY use to address our fiscal woes.

What suggestions would you offer?  And, what are your thoughts on the options italicized above?

** No, Leftfield, we’re not going to transform ourselves into Cuba.  Thanks for playing, though.

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  • fortbuckley

    If you’re wondering…yes, some comments that were on this blog earlier are no longer here. (At least I think they’re no longer here—I’m still learning WordPress.)

  • http://kynn.com/ kynn

    Why would we want to participate here, if you’re just going to delete comments you don’t like?

    • fortbuckley

      kynn, I deleted your later comments because you were threadjacking. The purpose of this discussion thread was to propose practical suggestions for reducing our children’s federal entitlement burden. Pretty quickly, you stopped doing that and started throwing rocks. (In your first comments, you implied I was “grinding axes,” without clarifying what you meant by that. Did you think I was psychic?)

      But, let’s address your primary suggestion for reducing federal entitlements—cutting my personal retired pay and Social Security 20%. I agree, as long as everyone who’s 45 or younger does the same. (Actually, you suggested cutting my personal federal pay 20%. Sounds good to me! In fact, cut my federal salary 100%! As I’m a defense contractor, I’m a private sector employee.)

      One of the big reasons I deleted your later threads—you were arguing for the sake of arguing. We had way too much of that on the old Tucson Citizen website. It got so bad that lots of people I know wouldn’t look at the online Citizen because they thought it was such a mess. Take a look at Red Star’s and Leftfield’s comments on my original post and you’ll see what I mean.

      There are plenty of places to rant and be silly in a blog’s Comment section. Maybe Next of Kynn will be one of those places. Fort Buckley won’t be. Now, that may sound high-handed of me. I certainly don’t mean to be high-handed or sound arrogant.

      But, I’m determined to not let the Comments sections of my blog degenerate. I want to attract people that want to have a thoughtful discussion, not repel them.

      Perhaps you and I got off on the wrong foot. If so, I welcome your thoughtful comments in the future.

      • http://thedataport.wordpress.com Art Jacobson

        Dear Fort..

        Let me shoulder in here. I’m afraid I agree with Kynn’s original objection.
        For one thing, you may not be the best person to judge whether the comments thread is being ‘highjacked.’ Perhaps something is going on in the highjacker’s
        mind that you need to dig into.

        But apart from that, it seems to me that you have to give your readers credit for enough sense to see when a thread is drifting. We are blogging here, after all, and part of the heat in the bloggers kitchen are those wicked old comments.

        Art

        • fortbuckley

          Art, I’ll have to disagree with you on this one. I asked for specific, practical suggestions on how we could reduce entitlements—Kynn replied by proposing that my personal federal pay be cut 20%. Does that sound constructive to you? Kynn left me with the impression that she planned on stirring up agita, instead of discussing the thread’s thesis topic.

          As for my taking the time to dig around in the hijacker’s mind—I don’t plan on doing that.

          I’ve blogged on Redstate for over four years now, and I know that comments can get heated. (I’ve made many a heated comment myself). Remember, though, how the Tucson Citizen’s Comments sections descended into a real mess, due to the efforts of Red Star and Leftfield and a bunch of others. Those aren’t the kinds of commenters I’m trying to attract to this blog. I may fail to attract them, but I do intend to keep trying.

  • Eugene

    Wouldn’t it be nice if we all could just buy something, then refuse to pay the full price after receiving the goods, because we “couldn’t afford it anymore ” ?

    Try again. Maybe not buying the goods in the first place, but to balance the books on the backs of retirees , people who spend their lives working and planning their budgets based on the retirement promised them is not exactly the way to go. Workers in the public sector do not get unexpected windfalls (bonuses) as do some in the private sector. Instead ,they depend on a retirement based on exact formulas provided by their public employers.

    Retirement benefits are not “entitlements “, neither legally or morally.

    This method sounds like socialism or even communism.

    I used to work with a woman whose family came from a communist country. Her family lived in a two story house and since there were not enough houses to go around (according to that communist government ), they had to move entirely into one floor of their own house and a new family was moved (for free), into the other part of the house. Now, should her family have taken the attitude that this was their duty , to give up half their house for the common good ?

    What was the other family giving up ? They did not even pay her family rent .

    Why not take this concept even farther and just cancel all military and civilian retirements ?

    I have noticed over a long period of time that many in the private sector turn their noses up at public employees, feeling they they (in the private sector ) are doing so much better. Then when things get tough, they become jealous and resentful of the public employees and retirees, because they are still going along at the same slow and steady pace they were when the privateers were feeling superior to them.

    Find a different scapegoat !

    • fortbuckley

      Eugene, what made you think I was talking about current retirees? My post specifically mentioned cutting the entitlements of people who will not retire for twenty years or more! Personally, I don’t support cutting benefits for anyone who’s already drawing them, or is in their mid-50s.

      they depend on a retirement based on exact formulas provided by their public employers.

      Those formulas are worthless if there’s no money to pay those bills.

      Find a different scapegoat !

      Eugene, you’ll find that many public employees enjoy much better benefits, and certainly much better job security, than many private sector employees. FYI, more and more taxpayers are questioning whether they want to keep raising taxes to pay the costs of public sector retirements and benefits packages.

      Who did you think would pay retired benefits if state and local governments started to go bankrupt? One city in California already has gone bankrupt. When entities go bankrupt, one of the first things that goes is pension and entitlement obligations. Do you really think that taxpayers will agree to raise taxes on themselves to pay for public sector benefits packages that most private sector employees can only dream about?

  • fortbuckley

    Why, kynn…are you going to be Fort Buckley’s very first troll? :)

  • fortbuckley

    OK, humor me. Let’s see some of your suggestions for how conservativsm, as a rational philosophy for running the government, would do things differently. If you stated them already on the original “Entitlements” blog, humor me again and restate some of them here, please.

    You’ve proven that you’re excellent at snark—can you come up with some substance, too?

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