deficit under the terms that bowles-simpson laid out unless you eliminate discretionary spending. everything we think of as being pretty important from education to basic science and research to transportation spending, to national parks to environmental protect, we d essentially have to eliminate. i guess another way of thinking about this is and this bears on your reporting i think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. and an equivalence is presented, which is reinforces i think people s cynicism about
if you eliminated all foreign aid and pork projects somehow we would bring our deficit under control. foreign aid accounts for about 1% of our federal budget. 1%. not 25%. not 1%. earmarks, all these pork projects, a lot of them, by the way, people like. a lot of them are a waste of money. we have to be able to distinguish between the two. and make it more transparent so that they are not stuck in the bill without anybody knowing about it. but they only cost they amount to 1% of the budget as well. what really accounts for our federal budget is medicare, medicaid, social security, defense, interest on the national debt, and then everything else from national parks to environmental epa, environmental protection agency,