The national debt is a complete red herring here. It's a real problem, sure, but that is completely unrelated to these cuts. The party implementing these cuts is currently debating how many trillions of dollars to increase the national debt by. They are completely unserious about reducing federal debt payments and there is zero ambiguity about what they are saying, drafting, and voting on.

That is also the same party that is actively attacking every single institution they deem too liberal. That's what they are doing here too: trying to destroy something they don't like, regardless of the consequences. The money being cut here is a drop in the bucket and the economic costs will almost certainly outweigh the savings. We shouldn't believe flimsy pretexts that are obviously lies.

I posted elsewhere about my displeasure with what is happening in congress. A large chunk of the Republican base is not willing to address the national debt; the $5 billion in cuts from the Senate bill going into reconciliation is a rounding error in the national budget. This seems like a golden opportunity for the Democrats to be the adults in the room and propose a solution to the problem with numbers, charts, economic projections, and math.

We're not seeing that. The national debt is not the red herring rather all of the ideological arguments happening in this thread are. Politicians *should* be working on fixing the national debt, but their constituency keeps telling them they'd rather balkanize. So that's what will happen.