At both the state and national level, our elected officials are dealing with budget deficits and how best to handle them. This leads to a lot of numbers thrown about, such as “15% cuts” and “$30 billion versus $38 billion” and the like, along with various stories about who is “winning” or “losing” the debate. What’s missing from these statements is any grasp on what the numbers mean: could any random voter explain how an additional cut of $30 billion will affect them, or how a cut of over a billion dollars to the Health and Human Services budget will affect the state? The numbers are too large, the subjects too ethereal, to be comprehended in any meaningful way. Thus, numbers are just thrown out arbitrarily, without any rhyme or reason other than making the math work correctly. After all, why are cuts so often in neat multiples of 5%?<\/p>\n
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This approach to budgeting has it backwards. Instead of starting with some numbers and working to determine what we, as a state and nation, can afford, we should figure out what we want, and then how to pay for it. Do we want to provide some level of retirement income and health care for retirees? How strong do we want our military to be? Should everybody have access to health care? How about funding our schools? Should we have reasonable access to parks? How about our roads? What do we truly value?<\/p>\n
Saying that we’ll “spread the pain” by cutting everything by some arbitrary amount is the easy way out, not only because it doesn’t require anything other than a simple algebra calculation, but because it shelters the public at large from considering exactly what is valuable to them and what isn’t. A 10% cut is a mere abstraction (and government is full of waste and fraud anyway, so a 10% cut won’t actually change things, right?). I’d be far more comfortable with eliminating programs entirely if we decided that something else was a higher priority, rather than just cutting the important and unimportant equally.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, I put most of the blame for our current method of doing things not on elected officials, but the people themselves. Poll after poll shows a huge disconnect between what government actually pays for and what people think it pays for, as well as a huge chasm between the notion that taxes are too high, and the notion that nothing expensive should be cut. If we are going to have retirement security, a large military, access to health care, a decent infrastructure, and a first-class education system, it’s not going to be free. In fact, it will take more money than we are paying now.<\/p>\n
So let’s be honest about our values here: what is really important?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At both the state and national level, our elected officials are dealing with budget deficits and how best to handle them. This leads to a lot of numbers thrown about, such as “15% cuts” and “$30 billion versus $38 billion” and the like, along with various stories about who is “winning” or “losing” the debate.… Continue reading The budget: numbers or values?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[66],"class_list":["post-465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-budget","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t