I’d love to see – just some serious auditing of gov’t agencies! If the DOT is spending XX Billion, just lets see where it is? If the FDA is spending X billion – where is it? How much corruption and waste would they find?

Think about how much could be saved if we just trimmed the fat a bit.

In fairness, the growth was false – on the government side, the deficit grew exponentially. That has definitely contributed to the current economic crisis.

I completely agree that cutting spending is important. But that’s exactly what didn’t happen with the last set of tax cuts. You can’t cut revenue and increase spending. Whether it was justifiable or not in a post-9/11 world, spending dramatically increased over the last ten years. I think we’ve actually become jaded when it comes to numbers. There was a time when a $2 billion spending bill would cause alarm – now, we consider it small potatoes.

I’m not sure what happened to the idea of not spending more than you take in – but that would be a wise course of action in these times.

If taxes always go up, then why does the left rail so hard against Bush’s tax cuts, which, incidentally, stimulated growth during a recession?

I’ve been middle class for a very long time. We know our taxes will go up. They always do. Even when Republicans are in office.