Al68 said:
You say my post is not accurate, yet say nothing that explains how so. And you even say "unless the law is changed", which means "not mandatory" by a reasonable definition.
I won't address this sillyness further, except to say that in the real world (outside of an undergraduate philosophy classroom) there are rules, and those rules must be followed. Amongst those rules is that the United States Government must obey the law. It is not reasonable for you or it to say, "well, the law might change, therefore its not mandatory".
Would you argue that paying taxes and not murdering your neighbor are not "mandatory" behaviors because, gosh, the law might change? Of course not. It is no more reasonable in this case.
Mandatory expenses,
by definition, refer to expenses which are
required by law and not
discretionary. This is not something I made up - it is accepted prose in every discussion about differentiable categories of government spending by reasonable people. Further, the original question was what categories of expenses would have to come first, under the law. The answer is mandatory programs, like entitlements, with the leftover funds going to discretionary programs, like interest payments (whether you agree with this order or not is irrelevant to the point).
$782B (2009), more than the rest of the entire world combined, seven times China, and the largest item in the budget is a pittance?
Keep in mind that the DOD regards China's actual defense expenditures to be about double the published figures, and that China (unlike the United States) has relatively tiny operational and maintenance costs. A large chunk of American payments go to personnel costs, followed by procurement and maintenance costs on existing equipment. The leftover goes to development and procurement of new weapons systems, and isn't all that much. From Wikipedia:
Components Funding Change, 2009 to 2010
Operations and maintenance $283.3 billion +4.2%
Military Personnel $154.2 billion +5.0%
Procurement $140.1 billion −1.8%
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation $79.1 billion +1.3%
Military Construction $23.9 billion +19.0%
Family Housing $3.1 billion −20.2%
Total Spending $685.1 billion +3.0%
Put that into perspective vis a vis China's true budgetary outlays of approximately $160B, a significantly larger chunk of which goes to developing and procuring new weapons systems relative to the United States, and you're suddenly looking at a better relative picture. Again according to the DOD, China is spending about 50% of its budget on procurement, and 15% on R&D - much higher ratios than in the United States.
Cut some of those operational and personnel costs, I agree, but these are much harder to go after politically than, say, a new fighter plane. We are in real danger of losing our generational lead on the Chinese. We may outnumber them in number of units and quality of operators, but as a matter of international prestige, the damage is in Chinese technical parity regardless of practical parity. The loss in clout to the Chinese will damage our ability to get what we want on the international stage (Iran, N. Korea, and Taiwan, for starters); this is the nature of real politik.
I don't know the savings figures for these actions, but anything that touches Medicare is worth billions. Political cost should be low too.
http://crfb.org/blogs/updated-health-care-charts
See there for the numbers. Specifically, the new Medicare taxes are projected to raise $54B in revenue, while the cuts to Medicare are projected to save $544B. The trouble is, outside the new payroll tax and the cuts to Medicare Advantage (which is an example of a program within Medicare we should be putting greater emphasis on, not cutting), they are all hypothetical and promised cost reductions based on promises of Congressional and bureaucratic action that may or may not arise but are independent of the Affordable Care Act. The doc fix, which Vanadium talks about, is a great example of this.
The point being, the Act itself doesn't cut much of anything. Congress just instructed CBO to consider separate government cutting action when scoring the budgetary impacts of ACA. Repeal the Act, and implement the cuts anyway (where reasonable and prudent), and we've got the savings minus the cost of this massive new entitlement.
