Let's get Fiscal

On the last day of the convention, we had three breakout sessions to attend. One of them focused on budgeting and the growing debt problem in America. This was an appropriate session to attend when you think about the candidate our group focused on, and that person is Rand Paul. Paul has a very extensive tax reform at the ready for when he possibly becomes president. He has it outlined on his website, and also he is extremely concerned with the mounting debt problem in America. So to tie everything together, our group went to the discussion about the debt which didn’t turn out to be a discussion at all.

The two people leading the session was former Congressman Richard Sweat and Chase Hagaman who is the regional director of the Concord Coalition, which promotes fiscal responsibility in Washington. They both spoke for a few minutes about the activity that we would be doing. Former congressman Sweat is also a former architect. To help us understand budgeting he likened it to building a house. The people who live in that house like to do different things. Someone might like to cook, so that person would like a kitchen with all the upgrades. Another person might like to entertain so he or she might want an extra-large dining room. While it would be wonderful to have all those things and cater to everyone’s interest in the house, there needs to be compromise because there is a budget. The same thing happens in Congress when making budget deals. Congressmen need to compromise because certain programs can’t take up all of the budget. To really get the room thinking about this, we split up into groups and were given our activity packets. We would pretend to be members of Congress and would have to decide what things were to be cut or saved, and then we would figure out how much we had taken off the current $7.6 trillion deficit.

These packets gave us a bit of background on how Congress splits up the budget, and where the most money is spent. Other pages described what each of the categories meant and what specific programs fell under them, the pros and cons of cutting money from that category, and it also broke down the category by specific programs and how much that program cost. The main pages we were interacting with had a list of the categories that federal money is spent on, and the overall dollar amount next to it. For example, the amount spent on discretionary spending is $929 billion. Next to that was a question which asked, “Would you enact for this to be cut?” Our group decided to cut it. “Discretionary spending” is money spent on defense and non-defense things like education or infrastructure. Initially we skipped this because we weren’t sure what the other categories contained and how we would feel about those things, and also $929 billion is a lot of money. Later on we decided to invest $106 billion into infrastructure, education, and emergency management, and a lot of that $929 billion in discretionary spending already went to some of those programs. Our group cut domestic spending ($101 billion), defense spending ($138 billion), and Social Security Spending ($942 billion), we invested in infrastructure, education and emergency management ($106 billion), made changes to Affordable Care Act and limit malpractice lawsuits which was a cut of $327 billion, increased the gas tax which allowed us to cut $469 billion from the budget, and increased revenue through a tax reform which saved us an extra $1.2 trillion. We did not touch Medicare and Medicaid ($857 billion). In the end we took off $4.6 trillion from the current deficit of $7.6 trillion. We felt like we took something from everyone, and covered all federal programs at the bare minimum.

This was not an easy job and it’s a lot easier said than done when you really get down to the nitty gritty of it all. It’s easy to say, “Just cut the defense budget!” or “get rid of Medicaid!” but the implications of doing that have harmful effects on the economy and also the people who use those programs. It was very similar to an omnibus bill where everything had to be cut or nothing could be cut. We talked each decision through as a group and rationalized each cut we made. Some of the money we wish we could untie from the overall category and cut just give the bill a trim and be done. Unfortunately that wasn’t how the activity worked. We got a good sense of how difficult this could be for members of Congress. It was impossible to see something good come out of cutting a program. If you cut one program, then that meant you would have to completely reform that program to make it work again, or give it over to the private sector to make it work.

It was one of the hardest things to do and if this were real, so many things wouldn’t exist like Amtrak, or TRICARE health insurance for military members. But there have to be compromises in every deal and we felt like we successfully did that while still leaving the country somewhat intact.