What to Cut?

The elephant in the Federal Budget room.

Hmmmm, I wonder where we should cut if we’re going to cut?  Damn your prescience, President Eisenhower!

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

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9 thoughts on “What to Cut?

  1. simple solution stolen from an op-ed writer in the NYT a while back…I’d give him the props if I could remember his name or find the piece…but here ‘s the gist:

    Put the Republicans in charge of finding revenue enhancements that they can live with and know they can get passed.

    Put the Democrats in charge of finding budget cuts that they can live with and know they can get passed.

    Each side feels the pain, each side has to be serious, and the budget gets fixed.

  2. And let’s keep in mind that despite growing military spending in China and Russia, the United States spends 45% of the total world spending on ‘defense’.

  3. One of the only Constitutional duties of the federal government is to maintain a military (also, print money). I wonder what the 6% toward education spending goes to, considering that’s not even a federal function. Mostly bureaucrats at the bloated agency and some school lunches. Or the Ag Dept where there are more government employees than farmers. Or 2% Energy — what do they even do?!

    Also, please note the asterisk that it’s only DISCRETIONARY spending. How about you don’t mislead us and add in Social Security, Medicare, etc. to show us the FULL picture about the programs that are really gobbling up the budget.

    1. I believe Pres George W Bush was a huge fan of the Dept. of Education…quite frankly I’d like to see the feds get out of education or go all in.

    2. I don’t recall where in the constitution it said we needed to spend more on the military-industrial complex than all other nations on Earth combined. Perhaps you could point to the article and paragraph in your copy of the Constitution because the copy I have doesn’t say that.

      But it does stipulate the creation and maintenance of a Postal Service, but the GOP seems intent on blowing that up. So I guess the constitutional purity of the right isn’t quite as pure as you might want it to be.

      Interestingly, this kind of “drown it in the bathtub” conservatism is going the way of the Dodo Bird. If a new breed of conservative emerges from the ashes of the Norquist know-nothing party, it may look like something more sensible, something defined in this article by Richard Thiel in The New Republic Online:

      Most narrowly, can our government restart the stalled innovation engine?

      The state can successfully push science; there is no sense denying it. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo program remind us of this possibility. Free markets may not fund as much basic research as needed. On the day after Hiroshima, the New York Times could with some reason pontificate about the superiority of centralized planning in matters scientific: “End result: An invention [the nuclear bomb] was given to the world in three years which it would have taken perhaps half a century to develop if we had to rely on prima donna research scientists who work alone.”…

      Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years.

      Government is not, and never has been, our only problem. In many instances, it has proven beneficial.

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