1. Putting the retirement age on a more rapid cohort-by-cohort escalator, to keep the ratio of those retired to those of the working population constant.

2. Adding deductibles to Medicaid and Medicare to at least prevent the growth in expenditure from exceeding the growth in nominal gross domestic product.

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Aside from that, there is the penchant of the political parties for distributing bon bons via tax preferences. Mr. Reagan’s bedraggled tax reform was partially undone by Mr. Clinton’s interest in ‘targeted tax cuts’. Paul Ryan takes a great interest in expunging cross-subsidies through the tax code. Does the President give a rip about this?

1. “Overseas contingency operations” prior to the withdrawal from Iraq amount to around 4% of federal spending on Mr. Obama’s budgets.

2. Banking crises are expensive. Again, the expenditure associated with every aspect of the rescue of the financial system was complete by the end of 2009, bar some financing of the deficits of the mortgage maws. After that, the deficits should have been driven by revenue losses derived from slack in the economy and the expansion of unemployment compensation. We have not had deficits in the range of 2-5% of domestic product, but rather 9% of domestic product. He appoints the Simpson-Bowles commission, which gave him cover, then he ignores it. He owns this situation.

3. Some of the foregoing you would replace with formulaically distributed revenue sharing or with rebates under a negative income tax, but here goes. Funds not spent, or at least programs replaced:

a. $700+ bn in patronage distribution to state and local governments (derived from standing lists of pet projects of the Democratic congressional caucus).

b. A ten figure sum in discrete grants and loans to the green energy sector. (Last time I checked the book value of the Department of Energy’s loan portfolio was $50 bn).

c. Ongoing maintenance of over 50 petty independent agencies with a combined budget of around $7 bn – Claiborne Pell’s pet projects and other zombies the first to go.

d. Patronage distributed through NASA, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Science Foundation, and the Environmental Protection Agency (~$19 bn, IIRC).

e. Subsidized home loans for veterans’ (< 1 bn).

f. Subsidies to state education departments, local school districts, and higher education ($92 bn – and requiring regulatory changes you will never see).

g. Patronage distributed through the national laboratories and…

Douglas Johnson,

One could also note that the budgets for 2007-2009 were George Bush’s. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were George Bush’s. Obama took office in a serious recession, which began under George Bush in the midst of an unprecedented fiscal crisis that began under George Bush.

What federal money spent under Obama should not have been spent?

One could also simply note that federal spending is up 40% since 2007.

I prefer ‘poseur’. YMMV

George W. Bush started the war in Afghanistan? And I suppose FDR bombed Pearl Harbor?

Art Deco,

I have only a few moments this afternoon, so I will try to respond more fully later. But I would just like to point out (as I have before) that denying something another poster has said followed by “and you know it” is basically calling the person a liar. When I said culture of dependency is a meaningless cliche, I fully believed what I said to be true. If you disagree, fine. If you want to argue about it, fine. But if you want to claim that I am saying something I know to be false, you are in effect saying, “You’re a liar.” On top of that, there’s something petulant about saying, “And you know it.” One imagines a person with hands on hips, grimacing and stomping one foot on the ground.

Just to point out, if the Government of Afghanistan had wished to be left in peace, they chose the wrong course of action. Ditto Saddam Hussein, with whom we had been in a state of belligerency since 1990, for obvious reasons.

It should also be noted that industrial capacity utilization during the period running from the fall of 2000 to the fall of 2005 was consistently below long term means. It was not altogether unreasonable to be running modest deficits (~2.5% of gross domestic product). By fiscal year 2006/07, the annual public sector borrowing stood at around 1.2% of gdp per annum, higher than it should have been, but pretty penny-ante in context. The TARP program completed its disbursements at the end of 2009, but we have continued to run deficits of 9% of gdp per annum in the intervening years. The condition of the economy does not justify borrowing on that scale. There is fiscal irresponsibility and there is fiscal irresponsibility.

It is nothing of the sort, David, and you know it. When you have an entire economy of a subset of the population organized around the distribution of means tested benefits traffick-copped by county social workers, you get a culture of dependency.

Back in the day, David Ellwood discovered that the mean duration on Aid to Families with Dependent Children was 6.6 years. However, that was the mean of two distinct populations. One stream was on and off after a brief term of years (2 years) and were a minority of those on at any one time; the other stream were persistent recipients. A close relation of mine was hired in 1981 to do house to house tutoring for the city school district in Rochester, N.Y. Her 1st pupil was a 16 year old pregnant girl in a family with an unmarried mother and four children. The mother had been on AFDC since 1965; the mother was around 30.

AFDC is gone, but you still have food stamps, some public housing, housing vouchers, and Medicaid. The eligibility criteria have grown progressively lax, so now north of 30% of the population qualifies. The means testing creates a perverse incentive to restrict one’s work effort, subvening people’s groceries promotes over-eating, and the administration of housing voucher programs creates fiendish difficulties for landlords and neighbors alike, frustrating the educative effect of those sorts of social relations.

Did I mention Social Security Disability? Admittedly, consistent and valid determinations of disability are difficult for an apparat to do, but it is interesting how since 1970 life expectancy at birth has increased by about three or four years while we at the same time the share of the working aged population deemed crippled has doubled. The person in my social nexus most recently declared disabled was so due to ‘fibromyalgia’; she is…