The bi-partisan budget deficit super-committee has less than 8 days left to find a mandated $1.2 Trillion in deficit reduction (spending cuts/tax increases) over 10 years.   And they have been struggling to come up with a plan both sides can agree with.   Think about this.  They are fighting over not being able to cut the deficit by $120 billion per year.  ($120 billion x 10 years = $1.2 Trillion)

They can’t “cut the deficit” by $120 billion/yr.?  Seriously.   The total gov’t spending is $3.6 trillion/yr.  The deficit is $1.3 trillion/yr and they cannot cut $120 billion.

The Congressional Budget Office recently finished tallying the revenue and spending figures for fiscal 2011, which ended September 30, and no wonder no one in Washington is crowing. The political class might have its political pretense blown. This is said to be a new age of fiscal austerity, yet the government had its best year ever, spending a cool $3.6 trillion. That beat the $3.52 trillion posted in 2009, when the feds famously began their attempt to spend America back to prosperity.
What happened to all of those horrifying spending cuts? Good question. CBO says that overall outlays rose 4.2% from 2010 (1.8% adjusted for timing shifts), when spending fell slightly from 2009. Defense spending rose only 1.2% on a calendar-adjusted basis, and Medicaid only 0.9%, but Medicare spending rose 3.9% and interest payments by 16.7%.
The bigger point: Government austerity is a myth. (read more)
Now lets take a look at that chart again. It shows the budget trend over the last five years, and it underscores the dramatic negative turn since the Obama Presidency began. The budget deficit increased slightly in fiscal 2011 from a year earlier, to $1.298 trillion. That was down slightly as a share of GDP to 8.6%, but as CBO deadpans, this was still “greater than in any other year since 1945.”
Mull over that one. The Obama years have racked up the three largest deficits, both in absolute amounts and as a share of GDP, since Hitler still terrorized Europe. Some increase in deficits was inevitable given the recession, but to have deficits of nearly $1.3 trillion two years into a purported economic recovery simply hasn’t happened in modern U.S. history. Yet President Obama fiercely resisted even the token spending cuts for fiscal 2011 pressed by House Republicans earlier this year.
The table also shows how close the federal budget was to balance as recently as fiscal 2007, with a deficit as low as $161 billion, or 1.2% of GDP. Those are the numbers to point to the next time someone says that the Bush tax rates are the main cause of our current fiscal woes.
Pay particular attention to the date Fiscal 2007. Why is that important? The Media continues to babble on about Obama inheriting a huge deficit from Bush. Amazingly enough a lot of people swallow this nonsense. So once more, a short civics lesson. Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress, and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 was the Democrat Party. They controlled the budget process for FY 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011.
In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush belatedly got tough on spending increases.
For FY 2009 though, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets. And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete FY 2009. Let’s remember what the deficits looked like during that period:

If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the FY 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets. If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself.
In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is I inherited a deficit that I voted for and then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 2009.
It is appropriate to keep facts in the conversation when engaging with progressives, liberals, and even moderate conservatives on these issues. This is a truthful context.
And think about this staggering fact: The last budget used by the federal government to determine spending priorities was signed in the fall of 2007 by George W. Bush for fiscal year 2008. There has not been one annual budget passed since then. Obama has not served one day in office with a spending budget in place. NOT ONE DAY. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid chose to support Obama’s insane spending binge by funding government with continuing resolutions for Fiscal years 2009, 2010, 2011 and now 2012. Democrats held filibuster-proof majorities in both houses of congress for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 yet they never even proposed a budget. They could have passed a budget of any size, but they never even brought one forth to discuss any limit on deficit spending.
Yet those same people who made a conscious choice to avoid their primary job of creating a budget have the nerve to call the Tea Party terrorists. Who exactly is the economic terrorist in this discussion?
Lastly we would be remiss if we left this discussion without looking at Obama’s corrective proposal to address the deficit. He has proposed what he calls the “Buffett Rule” for taxation on the rich, named after tycoon Warren Buffet, which Obama claims will “pay for” any spending, stimulus, and close the budget. Yet there is one problem. The tax proposal would only generate $40 billion more per year, and the federal deficit is $1.3 Trillion. (A trillion is a thousand billions) So his revenue falls $1,260 billions short.
Even if you take 100% of the income from every millionaire and billionaire in the country, take every dime from them, you still will not even come close to closing the budget deficit. It’s a spending issue, NOT a taxation issue. Check out this chart below. It is designed to reflect the current reality that millionaires and billionaires pay around 29.1% of their income in taxes. This is after all deductions etc., currently they pay around 29.1% so that becomes the baseline.

The Red Line is how much we are deficit spending. You can clearly see that even if you take 100% of income (every penny) from every millionaire and billionaire in the entire country you can only raise a little over $400 billion, leaving you still a TRILLION DOLLARS short of closing the deficit gap.
Again, this is NOT a taxation issue, this is a spending issue.
The problem (deficit) cannot be fixed by taxation. Not even close. Massive spending cuts are needed. Massive spending cuts.