The problem is you really can't do much trimming from emergency sevices during bad times, recessions tend to see an increase in crime. People tend to be lax in doing car maintenance, and usually road repairs get delayed and decreased at the same time, more accidents. The pothole that damaged your already balding tire and resulted in you faceplanting into a phone pole costs way less to fix than the entire public education now splattered on the pole. Or burned up in a house fire because people get bad about replacing old wiring or fixing the furnace because they're low on cash and firetrucks don't get their in time because they're overloaded with extra problems and fewer personnel. I'm a big fan of preventitive medicine, mostly drinking fluids and getting exercise, which are basically free... but I also consider cops, firemen, and good roads to be a major form of preventive medicine. Not so good for cutting cholesterol but very good about preventing dashboard fusion and spontaneous lead poisoning.

Without knowing specific cases I don't know if they're really cutting certain things more than they should, but by and large budget cuts are sort of a 'pick your poison' scenario anyway. Cut emergency services and you might get shot tomorrow, cut education and you might starve to death in a few decades when all the blithering idiots we didn't educate can't earn enough money to pay for your social security. Basically though, I tend to be of the opinion you can do a lot more slashing in non-emergency areas, at least temporarily, and do less harm. You can't raise taxes in a recession because that tends to be the rough equivalent of trying to douse a fire with a can of gasoline, your revenues are down because your tax payers are poorer, and you've already run up a big debt back when things were actually going well and you didn't really need to, which further decreases your budget because you have to pay the interest on the loans. So you have to cut stuff, and the fact of the matter is that most government funded things, while hardly hallmarks of fiscal responsibility, actually aren't the gorgons of waste people always say they are. There's not gonna turn out to be some hidden multi-trillion dollar budget item we can just cut. We can shave away a bit of fat and pork, but to really make a difference we're going to have to make some painful cuts.

Basically the analogy on this is some guy who gets a raise and then instead of enjoying his moderate increase in wealth, paying of his debts, and maybe sticking some money away for the proverbial rainy day instead runs up all his credit cards and buys a bigger house than he needs. Then he gets laid off or a pay cut and he's too ashamed to cancel his cable or stop eating out and ends up losing his house when it's over. That's exactly what a big chunk of our populace did and what the government did and it is the reason for this entire current mess. Difference between him and the governments is they can't file for bankruptcy, we have to service those debts eventually and we have to pay the interest on the principal too, so we have to cut the cable, get rid of the second phone line, eat bologne sandwiches for lunch.

It does suck, but every cloud has it's silver lining - albeit people usually get struck by lightning while trying to find it - typically after stuff likes this people tend to do a lot more penny pinching for a few decades and elect people who do the same. Hopefuly the general march of technological and economic process will decrease the overall percent of GDP that is our debt even if the quantity remains the same. (Crosses finger)