AXING SPENDING

Hello again! This post is about cutting costs in our glorious, beneficent, omniresponsible state. The United Sates is the largest single employer and the largest single organization in the world by revenues. As of right now, it has about a 600 billion dollar annual deficit of a 3.6 trillion dollar annual budget and an outstanding debt of a little over 18 trillion dollars as of today's date. Using accrual accounting methods, (the methods used by the private sector,) unfunded liabilities are stacked at just under 94 trillion dollars.

What does this mean?

It means that the United States is a very poor manager of its own finances. We can postulate a million reasons why this may be systemic, but we know it is systemic. The problem has only ever gotten worse and is projected to continue to worsen. This is a graph of the US Debt:GDP ratio.

The X-axis is time and the Y-Axis is the annual outstanding debt as a percentage of annual economic output. It's teetering on 100% of output as of now. In other words, the amount of money the US owes to its bond holders (i.e. US citizens, foreign governments, foreign citizens, corporations, etc.) is equivalent to the amount of output the US produces in one year. If the government decided to tax 100% of our income in 2015 we would just barely be able to pay off our outstanding debt. Lots of us graduate from college with debt we can't pay off in one year though. So how about a federal payment plan?

Payment plans assume that you stop accruing debt and start paying it off, in increments. We have not stopped accruing debt since 2002. The United States needs to stop its borrowing before it can pay back what it already owes.

Luckily, however, interest rates are very low right now. The Federal funds rate is near 0%, and treasury bond yields are also at record lows. This means that for the next few years, the interest that accumulates on the 18 trillion dollars owed to the nation's creditors will be at the lowest rates in history. Now is the PERFECT time to pay down the principle we owe.

What do we cut?

Everything. Especially roads, care for single mothers, border protection, veteran's benefits, government worker pensions, food and drug protection agencies, environmental protection agencies, nuclear arsenal maintenance agencies, defense spending, DARPA, medicare and medicaid, social security, and anything else I left out. And roads. I hate roads.

But... I could be convinced to keep foreign aid, the national endowment for the arts, and the Transportation Security Administration.

What does the dog have to do with it?

This one is obvious. The stump is spending. The ax is my soul. The dog's left paw is Ayn Rand and the dog's right paw is Margaret Thatcher. The dog's smile represents the masochistic joy derived from the scrooges and corporate liquidators of the world when cutting costs and increasing profits.

The funny thing is that you think I'm not serious. It gets better. I'll tell you more later.