Yesterday’s post listed reasons why the President’s budget for 2012 triggered insomnia everywhere inside the Beltway. Some lost sleep because their signature programs didn’t make the cut. Those folks’ll be struggling to restore their favorites over the coming weeks and months. In fact, they’ve been fighting tooth and claw for some time now, going back to last fall. Some lost sleep because it looks as if neither the Congress nor the administration seems poised for meaningful budget reform. A range of commissions and special groups have called for an urgent reworking of social security and other entitlements, as well as revisiting the income side of the fiscal picture, through some combinations of a value-added tax, reducing deductions, raising social security limits, inheritance taxes, and taxes on the wealthiest Americans. (Many pundits will tell you that any consequential steps have been postponed for one, and more likely two, budget cycles since 2012 is an election year.) Others are concerned that the fiscal picture, dreary though it appears, fails to take into account the true costs of nonrenewable resource extraction, environmental losses, and fossil-fuel use. A fully-loaded closet of anxieties! Something to fret everyone.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…Why you and I can and should get a good night’s rest, despite the 2012 budget picture. | Living on the Real World
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