The U.S Defecit

Personal note: Lots of work = no fun; I'm not sure how to attribute this image, but I think you can tell who the author is from the bottom left. If this image violates copyright or whatever, I apologize in advance and will take it down when I have time.
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As some of you may have noticed by now, Congress is in lame duck session and the budget, along with the Bush Tax Cuts, are in hot debate. Almost a month ago, the New York Times (or as my old American History teacher once punned, The New York Slime) created an interactive medium in which readers can decide what to kill in order to reduce the deficit. A similar proposal by the GOP created YouCut, which encourages voters to pick what they wanted to cut from the federal program. In my personal opinion, I think the New York Times does a much better job, as the YouCut program is more opinionated. Anyway, I'll list what I think of these two programs.

New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html

In short, this interactive puzzle addresses both short term issues and long term issues. However, many critics point out that it is limited in choices. I definitely agree with them, but I believe that what the Times has presented is a contributing step towards handling the deficit.

YouCut
http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/

In short, it lets voters decide what they should cut from the deficit. I believe it's a nice attempt, but it's quite lacking. For one, it only has at most $150b in savings, which according to the Times is only 1/3 of what we need to cut. Also, I would only agree with about a little less than 1/2 of what was proposed.

There's also a Deficit Reduction proposed by the Cato Institute, but I won't discuss it here because I have no idea what some of these mini departments do. You can't just say "Throw it away" without knowing what it does.

From what I can tell, a combined tax increase and a spending decrease can help. Of course, it's quite hard to predict what will happen. I advise readers to look at both, though the inner politician inside me recommends the New York Times more because it has more discussions on the deficit than the YouCut website.

On a slightly off topic note, I don't understand why there's a stigma with "elitists" from both sides of the spectrum. The right believes (as far as I know) that they know better than elitists. I'm not sure how I can explain why I disagree with this, but here it goes: "Elitists" are people specialized in certain areas, and this goes along with that economic theory of specialization. I would rather trust a gardener about gardening topics than a carpenter with gardening topics. On the left, I believe there's a sense of "They make too much money". I tend to side with the left side of the argument, but I do believe that if people earned it ethically(a description that is vague), then they have the right to that money.