OPINION:
The full report from President Obama’s debt commission has yet to be released, but some of the more significant recommendations of the commission are already being condemned by certain fellow bureaucrats and lobbyists who own some of Fedzilla’s sacred cows.
It’s time we slaughtered the Fedzilla sacred cows.
Before complaining that the commission’s recommendations have not gone far enough or have gone too far, let’s at least all agree that we have to start some place to address the nation’s escalating debt and deficit spending. And that may be all we can agree on.
The commission has not gone far enough in the recommendations I have read. Far more belt-tightening is in order. We need to make the belt-tightening painful if we are going to climb out of this deep financial hole and save America.
The pandemic of fraud and mismanagement of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare consume the vast majority of Fedzilla’s budget. Playing around on the margins of these massive programs by raising the retirement age may help some, but what we need is to get elbow-deep in these programs and gut them.
First, some obviously bad news: Someday, we are all going to assume room temperature. Now even more bad news: Medicare pays and pays and pays to keep people alive as long as possible. I’m a big supporter of life, but not on the taxpayer’s dime.
Roughly 50 percent of all Medicare costs are spent in a person’s last six months of life. When a person is terminally ill or without hope of getting better, forcing taxpayers to keep them alive isn’t fair. If the terminally ill individual or his family wants to keep him alive for as long as possible, then they should pay for it, not taxpayers. Adopting this proposal could save trillions of taxpayer dollars.
Last time I checked, churches have a few billion dollars worth of gold, silver, jewelry, art, real estate and other assets. Maybe they could use some of it for such compassionate causes. Maybe not.
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is right by calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme. We should put Social Security on a path to extinction. How about this: Anyone over 45 will receive Social Security. Anyone under 45 will not receive it, but they will be forced to continue paying into Social Security to pay for those over 45. What the under-45 crowd would receive would be tax-free individual retirement accounts and 401(k) retirement funds and they would be permitted to save as much for their retirement as they desire. This would phase out Social Security, which happens to be anti-social and insecure.
Fedzilla must be put on a strict diet. With the exception of the Defense Department, all federal departments, agencies and organizations should receive 6 1/2 percent less in their budgets for the next four years, thereby shrinking the size of Fedzilla by around a quarter soon. No bureaucratic squawking permitted.
Repeal Obamacare. We can’t afford it, and nowhere in my dog-eared copy of the U.S. Constitution have I read that Fedzilla has the responsibility to provide for our health care. We can and should reform health care without having the world’s largest and most inefficient bureaucracy - our federal government - take over one-sixth of the economy and then destroy it like it does to everything they get their miserable mitts on.
All earmarks should be made permanently illegal starting at noon today. Not tomorrow, today.
Along with massive spending cuts, tax cuts are essential to grow the economy. The more tax cuts, the better. And make them permanent, as in forever, except in times of war. I’ve never met a tax cut I didn’t support.
We need to move to a fair tax that includes killing the death tax, which is the most immoral, ugly and unfair thing in all of Fedzilla. Everyone deserves to have flesh in the taxpaying game. To continue to expect that the top 10 percent of wage earners pay 75 percent of federal taxes is robbery and is ultimately doomed to fail.
Our current tax code should be torpedoed and sunk tomorrow and replaced with a much simpler fair tax or a flat tax, both of which are light years better than our current behemoth tax code that no one understands, including the Internal Revenue Service. The very first thing we need to do to reduce our debt is to overhaul our tax code to a fair or flat tax.
Balance the budget. And then balance it and check it again and again until ever taxpayer penny is accounted for.
America is in debt because Fedzilla has grown too large, is virtually unaccountable, grossly inefficient and maniacally borrows and blows too much money that we, the taxpayers, are on the hook to repay. Currently, the share of Fedzilla debt is $43,000 for every man, woman and child in America. And it continues to grow.
If we are going to climb out of this deep financial hole, a good place to start would be President Clinton’s statement that “the era of big government is over.” This time, however, we better mean it. The fate of America is at stake.
Ted Nugent is an American rock ’n’ roll, sporting and political activist icon. He is the author of “Ted, White and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto” and “God, Guns & Rock ’N’ Roll” (Regnery Publishing).
Please read our comment policy before commenting.