Your Opinion: No proposal actually cuts federal spending

Dear Editor:

The Republicans are touting their new budget proposal. The Democrats are screaming "the sky will fall." (Perhaps the Dems could dust off some of their fear mongering sound bites from the sequestration discussions of a few years ago.) One thing needs to be made clear; no one is proposing actually cutting federal spending.

As an aside, politicians will never cut spending as long as we allow them to hand out tax dollars in trade for campaign contributions and/or votes. In 2011 it was estimated that every Chevy Volt that had come off the assembly line by then cost American taxpayers $250,000 in federal and state subsidies. Tesla stuffs $7,500 of taxpayers money into its pockets every time some rich person buys a $75,000 electric toy. Tesla also receives "excess energy credits" from the federal government. Elon Musk's three companies (of which Tesla is one) have received $3 billion in direct and indirect government subsidies.

Vote buying will continue until we shut off the flow of money to the federal government. Mortgage forgiveness, student debt forgiveness, free college education, free/subsidized health care, AMTRAK, farm welfare, etc. buys votes. I am not opposed to taking care of the needy, but I am strongly in favor of doing so locally, not nationally. All tax money comes from the pockets of taxpayers. We need to get the feds off our backs and decide locally what we want to support/fund.

The Republican plan calls for federal spending to grow from $3,664 billion in 2015 to $4,995 billion in 2024. A 36.3 percent spending increase over nine years. It calls for increasing the tax burden on Americans from $3,305 billion in 2015 (the most ever extracted from us) to $4,926 billion in 2024. A 49 percent increase in taxes. Under the Republicans plan the national debt will still grow by another $2 trillion. (Most of we taxpayers can't get our heads around the concept of a billion dollars. In order to spend the $3,664 billion the federal government will spend this year a person would have had to spent over $200,000 per hour, 24 hours a day, every day since the birth of Christ. In 2015 the federal government will spend $45,000 for every U.S. family of four. Are you getting your $45,000 worth from it?) From 2001 to 2015 federal spending had doubled.

Enough!