The budget and the debt

It seems that the GOP like to turn anything into a budget battle. In Wisconsin, the governor tried making stripping union rights a budget issue while Republicans in Congress thought defunding Planned Parenthood was a budget issue. Seriously?! You have got to be kidding me. But there is a method to their madness, you make everyone mad at you and therefore everyone will vote for the Democrats...wait, WTF?! They're plan is to spell out their own demise? I guess they really are that stupid, but I digress. So instead of tackling the real debt problems, they're trying to polarize themselves by picking minute issues.

However, I have a couple ideas on how to solve the debt problem we are facing in this country, something so brilliant that even John of Orange Boehner would never think of, nor would he approve. First off is cut the salary of members of Congress to the average salary of the United States worker. Members of Congress are currently paid $174,000, while the average American worker is paid only $32,000 a year. That’s over 5 times the amount while doing significantly less work. With 538 members of Congress, the savings would add up to $76,396,000. While that is a drop in the bucket, it’s a start and this only includes the actual members of Congress, not their staffers. The average salary of a congressional chief of staff makes $120,000 a year, and since they do more of the grunt work for Congress, they would have a salary cap at $40,000. This would add another $43,040,000 in savings. Figure in deputy chiefs of staff, district directors, and deputy district directors, there would be an additional $75,858,000 in savings. That is close to $200 million in savings every year. Secondly, cut the defense budget and pull our troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, and anywhere else they might be stationed. I have said before, we are not the world's police, so we should scale back to peacetime numbers. But the war hawks in the GOP will never allow this. So we'll continue to drive ourselves deeper into debt for the sake of the military industrial complex.