Farm Bill is first on the chopping block
Alicia Parlapiano et al, Margot Sanger-Katz and Josh Katz 3-6 {Alicia Parlapiano is a graphics editor and reporter covering politics and policy from Washington. Margot Sanger-Katz is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times, where she writes about health care for The Upshot, the Times site about politics, economics and everyday life. Josh Katz is a graphics editor for The New York Times, where he covers politics, sports and culture for The Upshot.} - ("The Programs You’d Have to Cut to Balance the Budget," New York Times, published 3-6-2023, accessed 6-28-2023, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/06/upshot/balancing-budget-painful-spending-cuts.html)//marlborough-wr/
“It’s incredibly difficult to balance the budget within 10 years,” said Marc Goldwein, a senior policy director at the , a group that backs deficit reduction. “It goes from being incredibly difficult to practically impossible if you start taking things off the table.”
The federal deficit is expected to be so large over the next decade that it would take about $16 trillion in spending reductions or new revenues to balance the budget by 2033. That’s about the size of the entire Social Security program. Or the entire Medicare program in addition to every anti-poverty program and refundable tax credit. Those outlandish examples come from a analysis from the committee.
Balancing the budget without tax increases, or cuts to the military, Medicare or Social Security, would mean cutting the rest of the budget by a whopping 70 percent. Cuts of that magnitude would mean the firings of most federal workers in agencies like the F.B.I., the Parks Service and the State Department, and huge reductions in food assistance and military retirement.