I heard an interesting comment earlier today on NPR. It was that it is really invalid to try to compare national/government budgets with household budgets. The rules are entirely different. For example (and this is me, not NPR), cutting household expenses isn't really the same as cutting Federal expenditures, and raising taxes (or eliminating deductions) is really different from going to one's boss and getting a raise.

The Tea Party Right, and many others in this country (including many on the opposite end of the political spectrum), seem to believe that the only way to reduce our overall debt level and bring the Federal budget into something approaching balance is to reduce spending...except that something like 70% of expenditures are apparently untouchable. Different groups have different sacred cows, but generally these would be Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' benefits, defense spending and the cost of servicing the debt itself. The whole concept of increasing income is either off the table entirely or is limited to soaking the rich.

IMHO, we spend entirely too much time and effort on trying to get the wealthy to pay higher taxes - and whether or not $250K p/a represents wealth is questionable. They have always found some way to get out of it - that's why there are tax lawyers - and I rather doubt that their actual tax rate has changed all that much in the past 10, 20 or 50 years, regardless of what the tax tables say. I am on a fixed income (2 different Federal retirement checks and VA disability compensation, none of which have had a cost-of-living increase in the past two years). The percent of my income "taken" by taxes has done nothing but decrease in the ten years since I retired, and I expect that I would not suffer significantly if it went back up to where it was in 2001. Fact is, folks, if we want all of these programs in place that benefit the working classes, than we are going to have to pay for them, one way or another.