Great article. There’s no sense arguing over whether this is the best way to cut debt or not – the items mentioned in this article are all very good ways to cut the debt that should be popular among voters across party lines, but which unfortunately will be blocked by the political elite across the political spectrum. At first I was bothered by the article’s conflagration of spending cuts with tax code:
State and local governments give away seventy billion dollars annually in tax breaks and subsidies Of course the two can be very different, and people who don’t seem to understand that businesses are taxed on profits rather than on income will often mislabel various standard business expense deductions as being the same as subsidies. But this article spells out the difference pretty clearly in a way I hadn’t read before:
when the government provides a narrow exemption from general tax obligations it essentially is writing a check. Some of the examples they point out are more ridiculously narrow than I every imagined possible: very narrow specific deductions for NASCAR, Goldman Sachs, Disney, mining companies, banks, railroads, etc. $100 billion/year here, another $100 billion/year in military cuts, and we’ll at least be headed on the right path.
stentartudge 
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