Deck Knight, that's a pretty good job of lowering the deficit without rending the hearts of every American and reducing our military strength into the ground.
My only gripe is the SS eligibility age - its way too high as it is, to make it higher would be pretty bad. Nonetheless sacrifices must me made but I'd choose another area.
Still, to do all of this would take more than one term and that might not be enough time.
Social Security can be taken early under its current age, but there are penalties involved. The point of Social Security is mostly as a safety net anyway for after your working years. You shouldn't even need it before then, since the theory is that as you progressed through life you obtained substantial enough assets to sustain your retirement.
As far as the taxes on "the super wealthy" TAY, the problem is that many small business owners have S-Corporations that offer the limited liability protection desirable for a growing enterprise (especially in areas strife with regulation like my mother's medical billing company), however when they file taxes it is under their personal income.
As a result my mother may have a "million dollar company" but that's gross income, and nowhere near what the company actually makes after deducting expenses (even excluding taxes). In other words my family is "rich rich rich!" according to the government because of the way our taxes are filed, but we're as middle class as basically anyone else, we live in a blue collar neighborhood, we shop at the discounted/local supermarkets and chain retailers, and we're pretty much as materially wealthy as any of our given neighbors, potentially less so.
But every time Obama talks about going after "people who make over $250,000 a year (how excessive that sounds)!" He's talking about my family because of the way our taxes are filed. Or basically to use this warning: You will know who they mean when they talk about "the rich." They mean
you, and every local shop you patronize.
Same with the "millionaire's tax." It's flashy and it sounds nice and appeals to a populistic strain against percieved asset concentration (monopoly is implicit). And then you have to ask yourself this: "Who is the biggest employer in my town, and is the owner of that company a millionaire?" The answer on who the employer is will vary but it is extremely likely that they are a millionaire or better. Millionaires have a large degree of global mobility and are all too happy to invest their million(s) elsewhere. I'd rather them stay here. For another local example, I buy a footlong sub for $3.99 for lunch every work day at a local restaurant (I split the sub with a co-worker for half the value, I don't eat a whole footlong that's insane lol). By my calculations I alone give them $1,000 of business every year. If 1,000 people did that then I'm fairly certain the owners of that restaurant would be staring down a millionaire's tax because of how they file, and if so may have to raise their insanely awesome lunch prices. If it were $4.99 I'd probably stay with my daily purchase, but at $5.99 I would adjust my purchasing habits, actually reducing their overall sales despite the increased price per item. Long story short, a millionaire's tax does too much to punish economic prosperity. It just isn't that hard for a small business owner to get to a million dollars in gross income.
My understanding of the space research question is that it was primarily about missile defense and the nuclear stockpile, however in general the physics that go into that kind of system are useful elsewhere since it's basically "how to hit a bullet with a bullet" on steroids. I am loath to cut any spending that goes into new research and development, because even though I do support reducing fleet size and troop presense abroad, I want it to be because we are making newer, smarter, multipurpose platforms rather than just leaving everything to stagnate. The enemy of this age doesn't fight with tanks and fighter planes, but if China runs into some civil unrest and has to militarize and invade surrounding nations or whatever to stabilize, you still want to have your smartest tech ready. R&D is the backbone of human progress, and one of the reasons I dispise rationing schemes for medicine. You can't cure cancer if all your medical facilities are figuring out how to assign 20 knee replacements to 30 patients.
Actually the way the estate tax question was worded the defacto choice was either default to Clinton-era (as "None" was basically this based on the wording on the Clinton-Era section) or go with either Lincoln-Kyl or Obama's proposal. Lincoln-Kyl was the least onerous and tbh the estate tax exclusion this year was really bad policy, sort of like "if you're going to kill your ailing parent 2010 is a good year for inheritance purposes."
The other part of it was reducing the Feds and the most important unmentioned one is eliminating farm subsidies. The price for commodiies is going through the roof and America has always had spare farm capacity. We now pay people not to farm in a time where demand for corn-based products is only going to increase. Not that I like subsidies in the first place, and farm subsidies have always irked me for their reward of inactivity.
Back to the Feds, they always get budget increases even though the work they put out never seems to match that percentage (they use 10% more resources and produce 1% more analysis). If these are indeed people with marketable skills and not just patronage hires then their work is more valuable in the private sector anyway. There should never be a time when the United States is in a nationwide recession while Washington D.C. is booming and vibrant because of all the new government employees they need to run bureacratic agencies regulating the rest of us.