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Feb
22

Budget facts

credit Prof Galloway

The budget hawks in DC are threatening to prevent us from borrowing money to pay our bills..if we don’t agree to some yet-to-be-defined and pretty massive spending cuts.

The total Federal budget for FY 2023 is $6.2 trillion.

About $3.7 billion is pretty much off limits. So, you may want to ask yourself, where are the cuts going to come from?

$1.5 trillion of our spending is for Medicare and Medicaid, and there are hundreds of billions more for the VA and other health programs. And the GOP recently said thy’d leave Medicare alone, and more states are expanding Medicaid (North Carolina appears to be next), so it’s hard to see where cuts would be deep enough to move the needle.

Defense cuts? Defense is $900 billion…Given China’s saber rattling, Russia’s belligerence, Iran’s new air force and movies towards nuclear arms, and the North Korean’s continued aggressive posture, that’s highly unlikely

Social Security? that’s $1.3 trillion, and the GOP has recently said they won’t cut it .(after saying they’d like to figure out how to privatize it…)

What does this mean for you?

Threatening cuts is really easy when you don’t tell anyone what you’re going to cut…because one person’s waste is another person’s income. 

 


Joe Paduda is the principal of Health Strategy Associates

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