Budget Shenanigans

House Republicans unveiled their election year budget which consists of cutting $5.3 trillion off the budget by sticking their finger directly in the President's eye and going 'ha ha!' by going after programs he's promised to protect (like student aid, Pell Grants, food stamps.) The do want to do something interesting to Medicare for people under 55:

To deal with the influx of retiring Baby Boomers, the GOP budget reprises a controversial approach to overhauling Medicare that would switch the program - for those under 55 today - from a traditional "fee for service" framework in which the government pays doctor and hospital bills to a voucherlike "premium support" approach in which the government subsidizes purchases of health insurance.

I'm cautiously open to this- we do need to do something about entitlements. (And the Democrats traditional solution of 'Make the Rich Pay More' doesn't work.) All these Baby Boomers are going to cost us way too much, but you know what they didn't mention: raising the retirement age. If they're going to bring down the welfare state as we know it, they can work an extra 5 years before shuffling off the canasta and cocktails by the pool. 72! 73! Hell, I'll take 70! But before you start rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic- be sensible and raise the retirement age.

They also failed to cut a single government agency- that I've seen so far. That's what pisses me off. All this budget wrangling amounts to pissing in a leaky bucket until we start figuring out which departments we actually need and which we don't. Consolidate! Eliminate! Actually make the structure of government smaller and leaner... This is like telling a morbidly obese dude that instead of the gastric bypass he actually needs, he should just lay off the burgers and fries for a little bit. Not gonna work.

Until a political party actually gets serious about delivering voters a smaller, leaner government I remain, as always, unimpressed...