About that budget

It's pretty well-known that the federal budget is seriously out of whack. If you take out the surplus social security revenue - remember the lockbox? - the federal budget currently has a deficit of about $700 billion a year. This is unsustainable.

So where does this money go? I'm going to ignore the biggies - like the Pentagon - for now, that's for a later post.

Instead, let's look at a few other things - like churches sucking at the teat of the taxpayer. How much money does it cost all of us to keep Jerry Falwell's entire operation tax-free? There are probably billions of dollars in foregone revenue - which are the same thing as spending - in thousands of churches that have frigging television stations and shopping malls. Tax them.

Next, how about that Byzantine homeowners' deduction? I understand the social value that comes from being a society of homeowners. What I don't understand is why everyone needs to pay for that by ponying up tax dollars to subsidize suburban sprawl. Makes no sense to me - end it. The net effect on home buying is probably zero, since people factor in the deduction before they buy, which is reflected in the price.

How about corporate welfare? New York City just gave Goldman Sachs - not a struggling firm by any means - a billion dollars in tax breaks to build their new headquarters downtown, not in midtown. The idea, of course, is to provide an anchor for the World Trade Center area, which isn't doing too well, given that nothing is really being built there. And the billion to Goldman is just a tiny drop in a very full bucket.

And even if you cut all the corporate pork, all the superfluous Pentagon spending (like on a missile defense shield that no physicist says will ever work), all the giveaways to Bush donors and even all the legacy deductions that do this and that, we're still not going to have a balanced budget.

Problem is, we need to have one sooner or later. So, sooner or later, there will be tax hikes.