Nobody wants to talk about the federal budget, that could be how we got into this mess in the first place. We have, however, come to that point of time when we are forced to take a serious look at what a callous mess it is.

As they adamantly explain the necessity of budget cuts, many politicians assure us the country is broke. Interestingly, others who are in the position to know are beginning to speak up loudly to say we are not broke, that there is no such financial crisis.

“The federal government is having no trouble raising money, and the price of that money — the interest rate on federal borrowing — is very low by historical standards. So there’s no need to scramble to slash spending now now now,” New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman wrote recently.

Economist John Schmitt, Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote that it’s a distribution problem.

“The real problem facing America is not that we don’t have enough to go around. The problem is that we have redistributed from the middle-class to the wealthy,” Schmitt wrote.

According to former former Secretary of Labor and author Robert Reich wrote in a March Alternet article: “The 150,000 households that comprise the top one-tenth of 1 percent now earn as much as the bottom 120 million put together.”

According to Forbes, there are 400 billionaires in American. In case you aren’t used to counting a billion of anything, that’s nine zeroes, or 1,000 millions. Think of it this way, if you socked away a million dollars per year you could be a billionaire in a mere thousand years.

On the other side of our bizarre reality are voiceless millions who are struggling with severely declining living standards. The newly revised census formula shows one in six living in poverty, with 65 and older showing the largest increases.

Lawmakers declare that all Americans must make sacrifices in order to balance the federal budget.

A few proposed federal budget cuts include: the Head Start Program, affecting children of poor families; the WIC program, losing urgently needed supplemental nutrition for poor women, infants and children; Pell grants, ending financial aid for 9.4 million potential college students; and community health centers, losing primary health care for millions of poor Americans.

Meanwhile teachers, police officers, firefighters — our everyday heroes — are losing their jobs, and the last of the labor unions are being busted.

That’s a heck of a lot of sacrifice for the poor, the working class and the middleclass — especially when most have nothing to fall back on.

Take a look at a few other factors affecting our deficit budget slashes that aren’t being talked about nearly as loudly: extended tax cuts for the wealthy; slashed estate taxes (for the top 2 percent only) and capital gains; corporate tax cuts and loopholes; Wall Street bailouts of $700 billion; military spending for what, no one will ever know how many billions have gone to military contractors; aid to pharmaceutical companies with the $400 billion Medicare prescription drug program; and sky-high health care costs.

Could this be where the real money actually is? Could there be less interest in fiscal conservatism than in politics? If lawmakers were truly serious, wouldn’t it be best to both raise taxes and cut spending?

One independent lawmaker is riding to the rescue. Representative Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) said in a March news release that he has just introduced “legislation imposing a surtax on those households earning a million dollars or more and the elimination of tax loopholes which the big oil companies take advantage of.”

Sanders added, “It would be morally wrong for the United States to balance the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable people in our society while asking nothing from the wealthiest.”

Jim Wallis, editor of the Christian Sojourners magazine, wrote in a March article:

“There is no doubt that excessive deficits are a moral issue and could leave our children and grandchildren with crushing debt. But what the politicians and pundits have yet to acknowledge is that how you reduce the deficit is also a moral issue.

“As Sojourners said in the last big budget debate in 2005, ‘A budget is a moral document.’ For a family, church, city, state, or nation, a budget reveals what your fundamental priorities are: who is important and who is not; what is important and what is not.”

Is it time to use our voices and our votes to let our lawmakers know what’s important?

Send comments to marylin.olds@gmail.com.