California's budetary back is being broken by its enormous prison system. At the same time, get tough on crime laws ensure an ever increasing prison population, which is so overcrowded as to breed violence by logistics problems alone.

Ship all those low skill jobs to China or some other third world rat-hole in the name of economic efficiency without giving a single thought as to what all those people who have been displaced, or what kind of job they would find to support their families or wheter or not those jobs would be stable.

More short term profit for Corporate America, and more long term Social Expenses for John Q. Taxpayer.

California's budetary back is being broken by its enormous prison system. At the same time, get tough on crime laws ensure an ever increasing prison population, which is so overcrowded as to breed violence by logistics problems alone.
Recidivism rises as a result and more and more investment in building more prisons is required.

They are now considering early release as a budget balancing measure, which will get them back to the starting point of ex-cons with no job or life skills burdening society. Then, more money is needed to deal with that. .

This is one way how NOT to handle necessary budget cuts. Prevention, rehabilitation and reintegration into society programs are much less expensive, and they undercut the cyclical dead=end needs of crime prevention.

Some of the resistance to budget cuts is just pet project protection, regardless of the justification for them.. Other resistance, however, is a fight for long term savings over short-term savings leading to additional expenditures down the road,

I have zero hope that the current budget cuts would be done any more rationally than other attempts to do so.

The problem comes when spending reduction or at least braking its growth is sought. Even more spending reduction than otherwise would be appropriate is in order in order to reduce our debt.

If oil prices weren't so high, an oil tax to fund not only Iraq but Persian Gulf protection against the Iranian threat would be in order. (The issue there primarily is protection of oil supplies, which are owned by others, not seized by us; the defense of Israel has normally been a distant second and would not be the reason for such activities by us as we are involved in now.)

For a sales tax I'd impose a VAT instead of a retail sales tax.

Reducing the size of government sounds good, but staffing reductions have also resulted in more waste and corruption in awarding and oversight of government contracts.

I would prefer an item by item careful analysis to identify waste, non-performance items and the consideration of resultant long term costs,
That's not going to happen, sad to say, and we'll cut some good along with the bad. Then there will be a clamor to reinstate whatever was cut. as a fix-up measure.

Then raise taxes by about 10 percent on those taxes Bush cut and then adopt a national sales tax of about 5 percent used to pay down the debt.

works for me. No haggling. No lobbies. No special interests. WE ALL pay cause we all got ourselves in this mess by voting for stupid congressmen.

While substituting debt for the tax increases, to support spending increases, which is wrong.

However, the other party has been guilty since the 1930s of creating a toxic growth of government, toxic not only in size but in scope, and that's much worse. And it is the big spender. (Social Security and Medicare are gargantuan already, even before the Baby Boomers retire and deficits begin with Social Security, the true point — around 2016-2017 currently — where the problem becomes crucial to solve, not decades later as dishonest people claim. If you think taxes and the size of the federal government are big now, just wait until then. The Trustees of the two programs have warned us about this for years but you know which group denies there is any problem at all, and it's not Republicans or conservatives.)

“It's the same party that cut taxes even though two wars were being fought. They also started the largest entitlement program since Medicare while cutting taxes.”

They should have raised taxes or better, reduced spending elsewhere, not assumed more debt.

The GOP has exploited the childlike state of people since the 1930s and especially since the 1960s in the same manner as the Democrats, simply not quite as badly or in the same exact way. Both parties are buying votes. The Dems give the children candy (and we're seeing all kinds of wild promises by Obama this year being made to all the childlike voters who are among his biggest fans), i.e., immediate gratification (entitlements, mainly, and other ways of buying votes). The unpleasant, in this case taxes, are largely handled by levying them mainly on others (who don't vote Democratic), where more of the money is, or on evil businesses, etc. The Republicans imitate the Dems but not so much with entitlements (though you see in Medicare a willingness to do something, albeit nothing that Dem voters feel is sufficient). They don't offer people immediate gratification. But they address something else, the unpleasant, taxes, by substituting debt. I.e., from many people, they “remove” or “hide” the unpleasant (actually just postponing it and making it worse eventually), and defer any normal hostile reaction to taxes which if raised to much higher levels would indeed be toxic.

And they're scared to take away existing entitlements, especially the closer to universal the entitlements are. (The more votes, the more GOP reluctance. FDR and his vote-buying of the 1930s and follow-on vote-buying in the 1960s had a sound basis in baser human nature.)

As to the combination of tax increases and spending reductions, it will become inevitable with Social Security and Medicare in the next 10-20 years. The most likely situation will be politicians responding to which of the two groups (the beneficiaries and dependents, versus the taxpayers and producers) happen to be complaining or howling the loudest at any given time.

I think it’s a great point you make about the lack of equivalency of the two parties when it comes to placing blame for the budget problems. It makes me want to scream and rip my hair out when the Republicans do it and the MSM bobblehead there way to agreeing with them. Most problems are NOT equal when it comes to finding whose at fault and placing blame. One party is always proportionally more to blame (sometime egregiously so – i.e. cutting taxes while you’re in the middle of two wars) and determining who that is usually relatively easy to do.

And to that old Republican “saw” of lets not look back at whose to blame, let look forward to solving the problem well as an engineer I can tell you most times when it comes to solving a problem knowing who caused the problem goes a loooong way to helping you determine a fix and more importantly not repeating that problem in the future (i.e. not extending tax cuts while you’re in the middle of two wars).

So Patrick, please do not fall into the habit of doing this, it is wrong and is not something a “moderate” would do.

Once again GS, thanks for pointing that out.

One party has gone out of its way to make tax increases toxic.

It's the same party that cut taxes even though two wars were being fought. They also started the largest entitlement program since Medicare while cutting taxes.

Maybe you know the name of the party I'm referring to?