“I need to lose weight, so I cut off my fingertips. Why is everyone saying that’s bad?” If you want to cut the federal deficit, we need to restore tax rates to

“I need to lose weight, so I cut off my fingertips. Why is everyone saying that’s bad?” If you want to cut the federal deficit, we need to restore tax rates to the level they were at around the turn of the century - rich people were fine back then, nobody gave up because their yacht only had a small helicopter – and reduce spending on the big areas which are the only ones where it’s mathematically possible for cuts to make a significant difference. For example, NSF’s budget is 1/15 of the Republicans’ proposed INCREASE in DoD funding. Even if we destroy U.S. science funding entirely and cede the global leadership role to China, we will end up behind of where we were last year even before the tax cuts add orders of magnitude more debt. That’s even before you factor in how much money the economy has lost from all of the work the government supports and how many businesses rely on government research and funding. Similarly, if you wanted to save a lot more money, you’d be working to make U.S. healthcare as efficient as government programs. Instead, Republicans blocked Medicaid from negotiating drug prices and shut down attempts to limit drug profit margins, which means there are individual drugs where the annual extra profit compared to pricing in Canada is greater than the entire NSF budget.