Democracy In Action or Inaction?
From Unsplashed
At 12:38, the morning of January 7, 2023 came the official pronouncement that California Republican Congressman-elect Kevin McCarthy would finally become Speaker of the House of Representatives. That this exercise took four days and 15 votes to get to McCarthy as Speaker-elect should not be a cause of consternation nor distress.
Yet, policy wonks, political pundits, talk radio commentators, and virtually anyone with a voice from both sides of the aisle described the longevity of the speaker election as a disgrace, an embarrassment, a failure of democracy, and/or something that should have been sorted out behind closed doors before the first vote for speaker was cast on January 3. Without a House Speaker, there effectively is no House of Representatives. Members-elect did not take the oath of office until well past 1 AM. Only at that time could any House business commence.
Everybody asks if their individual member of Congress “brought home the bacon,” meaning what programs or appropriations will financially benefit their specific district. Yet, to intentionally mix the metaphors, nobody wants to see how the sausage is made. Yes, it can be messy, but the finished product is typically something people enjoy or appreciate. Quite frankly, I would like my representative to come home to the district and report no new appropriations. After all, appropriations are spending bills, and Congress can only spend the money we the people send them via our taxes – what I like to call legalized theft. If the Congress manages to somehow cut spending, more of that money can stay in our pockets where it belongs, as we the people know best how to spend our money. Always remember, there is no such thing as government money.
Twenty members-elect fought valiantly for we the people during the four day standoff. We the people should be grateful for them in spite of being called hardliners, MAGA Republicans, even traitors and terrorists by some from their own party as well as the other side of the aisle and the media from Fox News to MSNBC. Clearly, they weren’t paying attention, as they should have been. Congress went from the infamous “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it,” under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), to concessions made by McCarthy to the 20 members on behalf of the American people that include having 72 hours to read a bill before it reaches the House floor (which still isn’t enough time considering the hundreds of pages many bills contain).
Some critics say the 72 hour rule will slow down House business. Sounds like a good thing on several levels. If it takes longer perhaps the members will be more thoughtful regarding the spending of the people’s money. Perhaps fewer bills will pass creating less regulation, fewer taxes. “I am open to whatever will give me the power to defend my constituents against this godforsaken city,” said Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX), one of the 20 who should be applauded for securing the concessions.
While several of the concessions made by McCarthy are “inside baseball,” such as eliminating remote committee work and proxy voting as should have been temporary during Covid, others include shrinking the power of the office of the Speaker, the ability of one member to call for the Speaker’s chair to be vacated, agreeing to allow floor votes on a border security bill (where the hell has this one been?), a reinstatement of a three-fifths supermajority required to approve any increase in tax rates. Another vital concession from McCarthy is the CUT-GO where every spending increase must be offset by an equal or greater cut in spending. As that needed to be a demand from the 20 holdouts, one should wonder what kind of Republican McCarthy really is.
“These past… days were worth it,” said US Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD). “Negotiating in good faith. Will it weaken the Speaker? In general, yes, but the Speaker, I think, has become a much too powerful position,” continued Harris.
Perhaps the most important concession is the requirement of appropriations bills to be voted upon as stand alones, as opposed to the behemoth $1.7 trillion omnibus bill passed in an 11th hour grab by the waning, outgoing Democrat Congress. There are 12 Congressional subcommittees each with its own set of appropriations, each requiring its own deliberations, debates, and yea or nay votes. Having them presented as stand alone bills, more attention can be paid to them individually with more deliberate decisions to avoid spending $400 on a hammer.
The one downside coming from the concessions is allowing votes on earmarks inserted by individual House members; a practice both parties have relied upon in an effort to secure passage of legislation. This is an abominable practice. If a given member is unable to secure the necessary votes for passage of his or her bill sans earmarks, perhaps it is too weak, unnecessary, or too expensive in the first place and should die in committee. Every piece of legislation should stand or fall on its own merits.
By forcing multiple votes to determine the Speaker of the House, the 20 GOP outliers could ensure the American people got what these House members were fighting for by bringing it to the people via media – print, audio-visual, and social. This is perhaps one of the purest forms of democracy in action, and these 20 Republicans should be proud of what they accomplished. While any American above the age of majority could technically be elected Speaker of the House – they don’t even need to be a member of Congress – those opposing McCarthy should have settled upon one individual to counter him for the purposes of voting. During the entirety of the 15 ballots, the following were either nominated or voted for by the 20 anti-McCarthyites: Jim Banks (IN), Andy Biggs (AZ), Byron Donalds (FL), Kevin Hern (OK), Jim Jordan (OH) – my personal choice, former President Donald Trump (FL), and former House member Lee Zeldin (NY). Donalds and Jordan both received 20 votes for Speaker at least once. Jordan, a member of the more conservative House Freedom Caucus, never wavered in his support of McCarthy, voting for him on all 15 ballots.
“We need a leader who can stand up to a Democrat-controlled Senate and President Biden, and unfortunately, that isn’t Kevin McCarthy,” said US Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT). Rosendale never once voted for McCarthy, finally voting “present” on the 15th and final ballot.
“This is the great part. Because it took this long, now we learned how to govern. So now we’ll be able to get the job done,” said McCarthy between ballots 13 and 14, prematurely expecting 14 to be the last ballot, instead turning out to be the penultimate ballot. Slowly they turned – 13 of the 20 voted for McCarthy on ballot 12, 14 did so on ballot 13, and 16 voted for McCarthy on ballots 14 and 15 with six voting “present” on ballot 15 giving McCarthy the necessary, at that point, 216 votes. As each of the 20 voted for McCarthy for the first time, the rest of the GOP members broke into applause. With the 216th vote came chants of USA, USA, USA from the House gallery.
The 20 House, at the time, members-elect attempting to thwart McCarthy’s efforts to become the nation’s 55th different Speaker of the House are:
Andy Biggs (AZ-5)
Paul Gosar (AZ-9)
Dan Bishop (NC-8)
Andy Harris (MD-1)
Lauren Boebert (CO-3)
Anna Paulina Luna (FL-13)
Josh Brecheen (OK-2)
Mary Miller (IL-15)
Michael Cloud (TX-27)
Ralph Norman (SC-5)
Andrew Clyde (GA-9)
Andy Ogles (TN-5)
Eli Crane (AZ-2)
Scott Perry (PA-10)
Byron Donalds (FL-19)
Matt Rosendale (MT-2)
Matt Gaetz (FL-1)
Chip Roy (TX-21)
Bob Good (VA-5)
Keith Self (TX-3)
We the people owe them a debt of gratitude as they stood up for and by the American citizenry remembering that they, the members of the 118th Congress work for the American people and not the other way around. It is incumbent upon us to remind them of that not just every two years when they seek election or reelection, but every day. Call your House member and politely let them know where you stand on the various issues. The main number at the House of Representatives is 202-224-3121.
Ah yes, the sad tired trope of we can just stop collecting taxes and spending government money. The feds don’t do us any good – they can’t appropriate on time. They don’t cut spending. Waah Waah Waah.
Conservatives, or people who think they are, need to get over this unwillingness to recognize that government does good stuff. They need to stop acting as if the federal government is the enemy. And they need to give up the ghost that sending back tax cuts to Americans will somehow result in something better.
You like interstate and US highways? Great – we pay for those with taxes appropriated by Congress (via block grants to the states). You like weather forecasts? Great – the NOAA Weather Services collects weather data 24/7 and provides it FOR FREE to Accuweather and Weather.com and your local TV station. How do you feel about breathing clean air? The EPA sees to that. Do you like your parents and grandparents not having to live in poverty after they retire? Then you like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – the earned benefits that Republican politicians always rail against but never actually cut.
Now sure, its a tragedy that we don’t pay for these services in full with tax revenue – but you can thank Republican politicians and their loath some “Two Santa Clauses” practice for that. For over 40 years Republicans have engineered tax cuts (most often targeted at businesses and rich people) claiming that the resulting economic growth will pay for the tax cut and more. Never happens. What those cowards don’t do is cut anything – not Defense, not Highway funds, not weather forecasts. Nothing. And frankly there’s no sign this Congress will do so, no matter how much Matt Gaetz bloviates.
As to appropriating on time – it might interest you to know that in my now 22 year career as a federal oceanographer, the House has generally had its 11 appropriations bills done, and ready to pass in July or early August. The Senate is always the hold up. And if a conference is required – well that drags it on even longer. I’ve said before here at OT that I’d love to get my full year appropriation in October as current law demands – but most years it shows up in March or April and I have to have it spent by July – which is when federal contracting and granting deadlines start to kick in. despite al the hue and cry, no business operates like that.
You might also take note of the fact that both houses of Congress usually manage to get Congressional Operations and Defense passed on time.
Finally we turn to taxation – which you and so many others love to call sanctioned theft or legal theft or some such.
So, the Congress has an Article 1 duty to collect taxes, and they clarified in the 16th Amendment (Passed by Congress on July 2, 1909, and ratified by the states February 3, 1913) that incomes can be taxed as part of that. You clearly don’t like it. So go get standing and show you are harmed by it in federal court. Go show how the services you receive from the government for those taxes harms you.
But let’s stop calling is theft shall we? Taxation is the necessary price for living in a governed society where government provides for the general welfare. Its a concept as old as time. A conservative concept if you will.Report
I disagree with a bunch of what you said here, but we’re in agreement about the framing of taxes as legalized theft. It’s possible to create an anarchistic model, but they’ve rarely been tried and never successfully on any scale. Anarchy happens, but a deliberately-chosen anarchism lasts as long as its neighbors permit it. The assumption of zero base government can’t be granted.Report
A Liberterin I know – who is professionally an Economist – once told me he wanted an itemized bill for government services that he could pick and choose from. His notion was that if people had to pay their actual share they’d slash government hugely to just defense. I asked him about how the public library and the fire service would be billed and he didn’t actually respond.Report
I too wish I could opt out of paying for the cops and the military. If only it were possible to do that without breaking everything.Report
Ha! You totally outwitted that person who isn’t here to defend himself! I’m sure that this unnamed economist was stunned by the observati0on that fire departments cost money.Report
He and I have been friends going on 20 years. I’m quite sure he thought I was being facetious. Its what we do.Report
Your economist friend thought you were joking that fire departments cost money? That rings truer.Report
No he thought the whole conversation was a joke given my wildly left leaning politics.Report
So what was the purpose of your anecdote? A casual reader might have thought you were bragging about the cleverness of your position.Report
You aren’t a casual reader.
My point was to show how some folks in one political strain think about paying for government services in a discussion of taxation.Report
…when they’re not taking the conversation seriously.Report
I suspect that libraries would be mostly okay. For example, San Francisco did a whole host of library bond ballot propositions and the last one that failed was in 1953. Recent tax hikes for the sake of the library did okay too.
Those came to mind because I remember some conspiracy-minded folks pointed out the fungibility of money and how this allowed for money to be sloshed around.
I suspect that, in recent years, libraries might have a bit more trouble but it’d be because libraries have picked up a great deal of slack for dealing with homeless people.
“Initiative to Raise Funds for Libraries for Book Stuff and Community Stuff BUT NOT HOMELESS PEOPLE STUFF! INCLUDE MONEY FOR GUARDS TO KICK THE HOMELESS OUT!” would probably pass overwhelmingly even in red states.
So if the granularity would go beyond mere taxation “for libraries” and extend to “well, what are the libraries doing with their funding”, I think that those would pass too.Report
I’m pretty sure most of those are funded at the state and local level, so probably not really relevant to federal spending.Report
Sure, but I think that, if most stuff got put up for a popular vote, the arguments that the most obvious good things wouldn’t be funded would be proven less than accurate.
It’d be the obscure good things that would see an impact. “Look, it’s important that we have *ONE* scientist doing the shrimp treadmill stuff. Your children’s knees will appreciate it when they’re a decade older than you are now.”
That sort of thing.Report
Oh yea, I think it is very unlikely that things would be wildly different if we took a line item by line item referendum approach.
When it comes to the federal government, I’ve heard it said that the entire thing could be fairly characterized as a giant insurance company with a giant military. And that’s where all of the debate and a lot of misdirection comes in. We’re insuring really difficult to predict and really diffuse risks, a number of which it may not even be possible to insure in the private sector. Which kind of gets to Chip’s point below. The demand for that in an economically developed country isn’t going anywhere. Put to referendum people might even ask for more than they’re willing to pay in, meaning that the current situation via representative government is quite possibly a fair approximation of public opinion.Report
I would be fascinated at a serious calculation of “how much people get” versus “how much they pay in”.
Not just the whole “you paid $X in taxes vs. an average of tax expenditures of your county/city/state/fed per person”, thing… but, heck, something like that would be good too.
Living in El Paso County in Colorado is worth $X.
Living in Wilcox County in Alabama is worth $Y.
Living in Orange County in California is worth $Z.
I’d really like to see that, actually.Report
I think quantifying something like that is easier said than done, at least once you get passed the public library, or maybe the local elementary school. For the big stuff the comparable question is what did you get out of your car insurance or home owner’s policy if you didn’t have any claims this year? What are you getting out of your life insurance policy?
There are certainly very wealthy people with sufficient assets to live comfortably no matter what happens to them. But that’s not most people, and the whole concept of risk sharing is that most people don’t get anything immediately tangible out of it, or may not ever. However there is still a value to it.Report
Yeah, it doesn’t measure the whole issue of how someone who checks 2 books out a month from the local public library is getting more use out of it than someone who never goes there… and a lot less than the person who checks out 10 books a week.
But we can’t really quantify that.
Periodically, there’s a report that comes out that says something like “living in the US at all is effectively worth $Xk/year” because of everything from water quality to law enforcement being relatively bribe-resistant.
So just something like that, only granular.
Because I’m pretty sure that living in El Paso County is worth more than living in Wilcox County.
But I have no idea how that’d be measured.Report
In a broad sense we already know this answer.
Assume you have the financial means to live anywhere in the world- in any neighborhood in any city in any province or nation.
Where do people like this choose, and how much are they paying?
Well, to live in the poorest part of a Third World country costs X.
But you have to tolerate crime and dysfunctional infrastructure and utilities and hideous levels of corruption.
So to live somewhere without high crime and drivable streets and reliable electricity and good schools and accessible hospitals costs X+y.
The market value of government services is contained in property values.
People, when given a choice,, choose high tax, high regulatory places like San Francisco and Helsinki because they are worth it.Report
“People, when given a choice,, choose high tax, high regulatory places like San Francisco and Helsinki because they are worth it.”
Oh? Seems I recall a lot of bitching about homelessness, drug use, human feces in SF driving down the quality of life. Helsinki isn’t really “diverse”:
“Finland is a relatively ethnically homogeneous country. The dominant ethnicity is Finnish but there are also notable historic minorities of Finland-Swedes, Sami and Roma people. As a result of recent immigration there are now also large groups of ethnic Russians, Estonians, Iraqis and Somalis in the country. 7.9% of the population is born abroad and 5.2% are foreign citizens.[2] The official languages are Finnish and Swedish, the latter being the native language of about 5.2% of the Finnish population.”
8 percent of the population is non native, and almost 50% of the non native population is Russian, Estonian, or Swedish.Report
Overall, we got $1.4 trillion more than we put in. But that’s probably not what you’re asking. And if you’re looking for how much each region pays in and gets back, you have a few problems, such as the Florida / Arizona thing of people moving when they retire, and the impossibility of quantifying the return on, say, aid to Egypt.Report
Aid to Egypt is going to be the same for Florida as Maine as California, though. So that effectively cancels itself out.Report
About 30% of gov spending is that sort of thing. 10% is military. About 9% is interest on the debt. The rest is basically redistribution of money.
That’s over and above things like regulatory capture, which goes a long way to explain why we pay so much for medicine.Report
That “redistribution” is Earned Benefits. Cut that if you want, but don’t expect it to be fun when you do.Report
Where everyone gets back more than they put in and a dollar collected in 1970 can be extracted in 2040. The political attractiveness of this doesn’t change that the math may not work.
Nor does it change that we’d be fine if Medical costs were set by markets.Report
The math actually works when you back out the IOUs that Congress has extracted to keep its tax cut failure so well masked. Its also a self limiting problem in as much as the Baby Boomers are bigger then following generations. Much equilibrium will be achievable once they die off.Report
The growth in entitlements is like starting a new war in Afghanistan every two years that we continue forever. So while the tax cuts make things worse, rolling them back wouldn’t fix things.
A lot of these programs were started with the idea that future politicians would find the money and after the entitlement is created there will be tremendous political force to keep it.
However Politicians run out of political will to tax things before they run out of things to tax.
If we have some sort of economic earthquake that forces us to balance, then I doubt it will be purely through tax increases.
I have my doubts.
The misalignment of political forces is between taxing and spending. When the boomers die off my expectation is the politicians will want to find some other way to spend the money. There’s a ratcheting effect here. Every generation of politicians needs to spend other people’s money in new ways to justify their own existence, i.e. buy votes.Report
Latest large percentage spending breakdown for reference:
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/Report
Coulda sworn we covered this just a few days ago.
For 50 years conservatives have been wanking on about deficits but can never, ever, manage to put together a plausible path to one because just simple math demands wholesale elimination of the most popular parts of government.
They try to pretend that government is out there spending money on things no one wants but as Dark has just pointed out, most of what it spends is on stuff that is wildly popular like Social Security, Medicare, and the EITC.
And it’s the same on down the line. The biggest things that states and cities spend money on are education, health care, and police AKA stuff that everybody likes.
Which is almost a tautology. Things that get funding are popular because things that are popular get funding.
Which is why libertarians and the Republicans are always trying to make galaxy brained end runs around democracy like paygo rules or balanced budget amendments, automatic mechanism type things that strip the people of the power to do things they want.Report
Giving money to me is popular, taking my money and giving it to someone else is not.Report
As popular as spending is (go free money) taxing is not.
What we need is to balance these two political forces against each other. Maybe the popularity of X-program actual continues and it’s able to raise taxes to cover that. Maybe it will have to have a haircut.
Highly likely the truth will be in the middle and some efforts to hand out free money will have to be curtailed.Report
Ronald Reagan raised taxes 13 times – albeit quietly – because he didn’t like the ballooning of the deficit that came from voodoo economics. Since then tax policy has only gone one way, as has funding for the IRS. You will note that the current GOP wants to defund the IRS again, so that existing tax laws can be more easily violated by big donors.Report
Reagan spent years calling for a reduction in the highest marginal income tax rate. He said that it would lead to an economic boom. He cut the rate by more than half, and we had an economic boom. He also began taxing or raised the taxes (I forget which) on Social Security receipts, which is the kind of thing we keep being told is political suicide.Report
He used FDR’s New Deal economics by pumping vast amounts of deficit spending into the economy, and then we had a boom.
If he were forced to use a “paygo” system, that is, reducing spending by an equal amount to tax cuts, there would have been no boom.Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReaganomicsReport
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/12/08/what-we-learned-from-reagans-tax-cuts/Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_tax_cuts#:~:text=In%201980%20Ronald%20Reagan%20was,rate%20had%20been%20since%201925.Report
Meaning the GDP increased massively so the deficit effectively had no change.
Not sure why that’s in there, it doesn’t seem connected.
The big problem is since Reagan was successful at cutting taxes then everyone else can do the same, but that’s an apple you only get to eat once. Having said that, there is a STRONG argument for cutting the tax code down to something that humans can understand.Report
“Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”
Dick Cheney, and most conservatives, apparently.Report
The political cost of not having a balanced budget is slight because people are selfish and short sighted. The political reward for either cutting taxes or increasing spending is large.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t have a section of the electorate that is worried about these things, we do. As a general rule of thumb they’re honored more when the GOP is out of power than when they’re in. This is where we get budget deals that actually restrain spending for years at a time.
Having said that, they’re a small sub-section of the grand coalitions and not a major power.
It’s like how the Dems go back and forth from being anti-war and being pro-war.Report
Yeah, what Dark Matter said. My point wasn’t to discuss the entire history of the budget and the economy, just to push back on the “voodoo economics” misunderstanding.Report
There’s no misunderstanding. Laffer, Stockman, and the lot have always been crystal clear that it was only going to work under a certain set of circumstances. Except perhaps for the first iteration under Reagan, those circumstances have yet to reoccur. and the GOP’s welding itself to the Two Santa Clauses hasn’t helped.
Contrary to what I am sure you believe, I am always up for a good solid discussion of budget and tax policy. I just happen to like to do it in full historic context and with raising taxes on the table. Because cutting our way to a balanced budget either means whole scale elimination of all discretionary spending, or massive Earned Benefits cuts. And even cutting EB severly doesn’t get you past the goal posts of the fact that our tax cuts are generally on income taxes, which by law have to be spent on discretionary spending – so again you are back to restricting yourself to cutting significant parts of government – like the FBI – that people seem to want.Report
I think this is a good summation and on target. Reagan overshot a hair (thus the 13 tax increases) but had a good claim for being neutral after we adjust for the size of the economy.
The correct pivot at this point should have been to economic growth in general. Bush/Clinton’s Free Trade Agreements count. Ditto Trump’s regulatory reform.
At this point the following would be great (in no order)
Medical Reform.
Tax Code Simplification.
Immigration reform (assuming this means “more”).
Ending the war on drugs.
Some way to give Congress ways to be useful without creating perm programs. Mandatory sunset rules perhaps.Report
Add tort reform to the list. I don’t see sunset laws having much impact though. As for the war on drugs, you wouldn’t get any concessions from me unless it goes along with welfare reform.Report
I thought Clinton did Welfare reform. Did we undo it?Report
“Fiscal conservatism” is the socialism of the right, the empty slogan that gets trotted out year after year, decade after decade, the illusory utopia forever in the future.
No Republican, anywhere, wants to cut government spending, nor reduce its power and scope. This trope needs to be burned and have its ashes scattered to the winds. They never have, never will.
It was this realization in the early 90s that started my path from Reaganaut to Democrat.
Instead it just becomes the smokescreen behind whatever they happen to want to do at the moment and then abandoned the moment it is no longer useful.
For just a few examples 19 of the 20 Congressmen wanted to overthrow a free election and install a dictator against the wishes of the people. All of them support stripping away a woman’s right to control her own reproduction. And all want to use the power of the purse to punish or reward friends or enemies.Report
This is only one of several places where the OP reads to me like a missive sent from another world, another time. At best. The OP simply assumes:
1) that Republicans given power will use it to cut spending (as opposed to shifting it to different things and running up deficits, which is what experience shows actually happens), and maximize individual freedom (which let’s just call a questionable proposition and leave it at that);
and
2) that Donald Trump would be a good Speaker of the House (whatever his other personal and professional merits or lack thereof, Trump’s means of exercising power is direct, public and unsubtle; his temperament and interest in public policy is is not compatible with the kind of work involved in administering the Speaker’s office).
Finally, it questions whether Kevin McCarthy is a conservative, which again strikes me as having a perspective so strikingly different from my own (whatever his other qualities, good or bad, liberalism is not one of them) that I’m just going to remark on how it feels like the post comes from a different world.Report
Well Kevin McCarthy is mostly Conservative if his Heritage Foundation score is to be believed. Of course since he’s within the margin of error of the average House GOP member, he’s not right wing enough . . .
https://heritageaction.com/scorecard/members/M001165/Report
Old enough to remember when OT articles wasn’t a place to parrot talking points of either party.Report
Here here.
You’ve articulated something that was noodling in my head for a while, but couldn’t articulate. That was one of the changes I noticed too. Hell, I can go to imgur and get the same talking points as some who post here. Much less of a serious debate than it used to be here, and perhaps conveniently some major issues just pass under the sites notice…..stuff i’d expect to be talked about more….Report
I guess that’s literally true; OT articles often used to parrot talking points of only one party. Not all the articles, mind you, but it happened and not rarely. Even this article embraces a mere 10% of the GOP in the House. So maybe “parrots” isn’t the right word at all, and it’s natural for people to espouse different world views. The unnatural thing would be someone complaining about the representation of the views on a site like this.Report
“1) that Republicans given power will use it to cut spending (as opposed to shifting it to different things and running up deficits, which is what experience shows actually happens), and maximize individual freedom (which let’s just call a questionable proposition and leave it at that);”
This is why I am no longer vote republican.Report
If medicare and social security are cut . . . I would like to see congressman’s same benefits cut an equivalent amount.Report
I would like to see Congressmen’s benefits reduced to a pro-rated amount based upon their tenure in office. A person who serves one day in the House or Senate qualifies for lifetime benefits – that should not be. While I am a conservative, I would not like to see Medicare or social security cut – we the people paid into these systems and should be able to collect at the appropriate times. As long as those entities exist, as long as we the people are required to contribute to them, we the people should be able to collect. Those entities should not be raided.
Every department should be on the table for cuts – there is massive waste everywhere. I am not calling for the shuttering of any given department here, there are those that should be, but that’s for another time.Report
Including Defense? The FBI? Homeland Security?
Look, I hate to keep throwing it out – because it usually ends a conversation – but if you add all revenues and all expenditures about 1/3rd of federal spending is on the proverbial credit card. Coincidently discretionary spending is about 1/3rd of federal outlays. So the only way to cut your way out of this is to shut down the entire executive branch, because that’s where discretionary spending occurs. If you don’t want to do that, you either have to significantly tinker with Earned Benefits, or you have to raise taxes elsewhere. You can’t nickel and dime this.Report
Personally, I don’t think your comment is a conversation ender, but more like a conversation starter – there are so many places to go from there. My previous comment in was simply in response to Morry’s comment above.
You’re not wrong in your financial assessment, and more’s the pity. Now here’s my bias – I have no problem shuttering THIS executive branch! That said, there are places to make significant cuts – don’t ask me where without a copy of the budget in front of me – but it can be done. Perhaps some departments and agencies should be eliminated, not to mention the myriad programs that are unconstitutional – to the tune of literally, at least 80 percent of the legislation that passes the Congress.Report
Nice to know you are wiling to keep talking. Most conservatives aren’t at this point. I do think it matter what specifically should be cut and why – though the “unconstitutional” part is probably not the hill you want to fight on, much less die one.
It would be an interesting read though – looking forward to seeing you publish it here soon.Report
LOL – examining the budget and the word soon should never be used in the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence, but, yes, it would be a worthwhile exercise.
As it seems you are new to my writings, I am always willing to keep talking – much to my wife’s chagrin. I have a blog as well – http://www.sanfordspeaksout.blogspot.com – it’s not all political – I just posted my annual Baseball Hall of Fame column. Yes, shameless plug.Report