Hal Mason pretends to explain the United States Budget Dilemma

I can't think of a better topic to relaunch this site with than this little nugget from Hal.  The video claims to be ALARMING! and at first glance I was even alarmed.  I mean wholly crap there is no way for the US to ever balance the budget!  However the images of the twin towers exploding seemed a little over the top for any life long accountant I know and when I saw it was being posted on every conservative website the jig was up.  Time to do the math (a phrase I often use because it for some reason drives some of my "friends" to near levels of insanity).

I stumbled through the same process Hal laid out in his presentation and arrived at the exact same conclusion!  I was truly horrified, but something still didn't seem quite right (actually it seemed to far right to be true).  I buy into the concept that "numbers don't lie", but my 25 years of business experience told me that presenters often distort them.  Time to dig a little deeper and flip through a couple more pages of the 2013 budget...  what a minute, if this is the 2013 budget why is Hal asking us to take a look at the 2012 numbers?  Umm, this very first summary table on page 205 of the budget seems interesting.  It shows revenue as a % of GDP for 2012 at 15.8% and then growing steadily to slightly over 20% over the next 10 years.  That is pretty interesting, I wonder if I looked at 2022 or even 2013 it would show me a budget that was able to be balanced without eliminating the entire federal government?  Guess what...  Hal picked 2012 because his entire premise falls apart if you use 2013 (from the 2013 budget proposal).

Having spent some time recently sharping my skills with the puppets from the right I knew this wasn't going to be enough.  I needed to go deeper and do some more math.  Time to see what the historical average was for revenue as a percent of GDP.  Let's see, my Google search shows...  ooh, something on the Heritage.org website . Tough to dismiss this one as "a liberal rag in the tank for Obama".  Even better, it is a chart used to defend extending the Bush tax cuts!  I will let you see for yourself what they have to say (http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/current-tax-receipts).  So the recession was the cause for the current low revenue and as the growth returns revenue will return to slightly above the historical 18.2% average with all Bush's tax cuts extended.  I am guessing the President's budget doesn't reflect all of Bush's cuts being extended and that's why he shows it just over 20% which coincidentally is the same level in 2000, a year before Bush took office, but I'll let you do your own math on it.

Now that we see Hal intentionally mislead us (no such thing as an "honest mistake" for a career accountant posting a youtube video using images of a national tragedy for emphasis), let's get back to the real problem which our debt currently stands at over $16 trillion and will grow to over $25 trillion by 2022 according to the President's budget.  Note, even Paul Ryan's plan doesn't produce a balanced budget until 2040.  Bottom line, we need to find a fix for our mandatory budget items (medicare, medicaid, social security, etc) so they are self funding, cut our discretionary spending (basically funding for the entire federal government, including defense) and further INCREASE revenues (yeah that means more taxes).  A little bit of irony as it is the exact same prescription Hal gave us!