In the wake of the massive increases to the national deficit brought on by changes made by the Obama Administration, many voters and politicians are wondering where the money to balance the scales between red and black is going to come from. This leaves some politicians eying the already troubled Social Security trust fund as the possible answer to this country’s deficit woes.
Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and various other social health programs combine to make up 40 percent of the federal budget. Under the current law, the budgets for these programs will increase. This means that the national deficit will also increase in the coming years. Politicians say there are two very hard choices they must make in order to get a handle on the ever-expanding deficit. Those choices are raising taxes on the rich and/or middle class or cutting the federally funded health care programs so that they cannot be expanded.
Erskine Bowles heads President Obama's Debt Reduction Commission
Erskine B. Bowles, the co-chair of President Obama’s Debt Reduction Commission, said: “As Senator Simpson and I have said all along, everything is on the table. No one has mentioned to me taking anything off the table.” The Senator Simpson referred to is a former Republican senator from Wyoming, who along with Bowles, co-chairs the commission.
Voters expressed their opposition to both in a recent poll conducted by Quinnipiac University. A panel of nearly two thousand registered voters was polled on their feelings for the proposed choices that politicians were prepared to make. Of those participating in the poll, more than seventy five percent opposed both options. Sixty percent say that the government should make increasing taxes on households making more than $250,000 a major component in reducing the deficit while seventy two percent stated that taxes should be raised on households making more than one million should be a major component in reducing the deficit.
Seventy six percent of poll participants agreed that cuts to Social Security and Medicare spending should not be the only way the government works to decrease the deficit. Forty two percent were in favor of a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes. However, fifty two percent of those stated that there should be more spending cuts than tax hikes in the combination-based solution to reducing the national deficit.
Whatever the final solution to the problem is, eighty four percent of those polled agreed that the middle class will have to make financial sacrifices in order to reduce the deficit. Four out of five participants are in favor of raising the taxes on the wealthiest in order to generate revenue. However, there are not enough households that fall into this tax bracket to have any real effect on reducing the deficit.
It will be interesting to watch how this unfolds in the coming years and to see which tax bracket was faced with the most tax hikes and financial sacrifices for the sake of reducing the national deficit.
