Are you serious?

The  government deficit is a serious problem, and serious problems require serious solutions from serious people.

I dug through the budget and found that $2 billion in subsidy checks are being sent to oil companies.  We'll call this Government Program A (or GoPA).   It works like this: the oil companies calculate and send in their taxes, then the government runs their financial data through complex calculations and cuts each company a check.  If you're serious about the deficit, is this a program to cut?

With a little more research, I found another $2 billion oil subsidy program, which we'll call Government Program B (or GoPB).  This program is more efficient than GoPA, because it's rather silly for the oil companies send in a tax check and then get a subsidy check back.  In GoPB, the oil companies calculate the subsidy and deduct it from their taxes.   If you're serious about the deficit, is this a program to cut?

Oops, it looks like I made a couple mistakes. GoPA doesn't actually exist and the real GoPB subsidy is $4 billion.

Republicans (or just plain old GOP) refuse to talk about cutting GoPB because that would be "raising taxes."  Apparently,  "spending" only occurs when you send a check to the government and they send one back.  So your Social Security is OK to cut, because you've already sent the check in - but hands off those oil company subsidies.

Are they serious?

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