Channeling Julia Child’s cooking videos, Nick Gillespie of Reason TV puts out this really amusing piece on how to balance the budget without raising taxes.
I have to say that the menu is visually unappealing — as it always is in Child’s videos — but the message is clear: It’s easy to balance the budget.
In fact, it is easier than Gillespie makes it look. First, you don’t have to touch raw pork, which is always a plus. Second, between 2011 and 2020, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that total federal outlays will total a whopping $42.1 trillion (in 2010 dollars); so to bring outlays down to revenue, we need to cut $1.3 trillion in total expenditures over the next ten years. Third, it means that you don’t even have to cut spending, really: You just have to trim $130 billion each year from the growth in spending.
Full disclosure: I like this video in part because it is based on my piece with Gillespie on “How to Balance the Budget Without Raising Taxes.”