I'm with Vararam on healthcare, and in the long run, the healthcare changes may reduce health related spending. The government isn't subsidizing it as we have to pay the full costs, but there is a cost to start it up. No one will know how the numbers really play out until years down the road, but the bill was written to be deficit neutral and actually cut into it a tiny bit in the later years.
However, I do agree that the deficit needs to be addressed and it is going to take more than removing discretionary spending. We need to modify Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, reduce defense spending, and dare I say it, raise revenue - a.k.a. taxes. Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and defense are the three things that take up most of the budget and are the only things big enough that cutting into them will seriously make a dent in deficit.
I'm not sure if the newly elected Republicans are willing to realistically tackle the debt. It's much easier to say we can cut our way out of the deficit until you start bringing up specifics on what to cut. I've heard some Tea Party Republicans suggest cutting whole departments like the Dept of Education, but that's politically unfeasible and these departments do serve a purpose. Proposals like that are more motivated by a very conservative political agenda than any real desire to fix the deficit.
The sad thing with the political change is that we lost the moderates of both parties. You may not always agree with the moderates in the party you belong to, but nothing really gets done without them. Moderate Democrats lost their seats in the house in the last election and they were a group of law makers that were serious about debt reduction. Moderate Republicans were culled out of their seats by the Republican primary. It's all well and good to stick to your guns on a position, but that doesn't get laws/changes to government passed and that doesn't get the deficit reduced.
