Joe Doakes formerly of Como Park emails:
We know there’s a battle coming. Congress’s funding resolution runs out March 14. If Trump and Congress don’t reach a deal on a new budget, the government shuts down with all the angst and drama we recall from earlier battles, with all the political risks that have made some Republicans unwilling to fight the battle again. So in the upcoming fight over the budget, what’s our view, the Conservative view?
Personally, I’d like to see something akin to Constitutional government. Article I, Section 8 enumerates the powers given to Congress. Go read it. It’s worth remembering that those are the ONLY powers the Founders wanted Congress to have. To get back to that, we’d have to cut about 80% of the federal government. I concede that’s not realistic in today’s political climate.
What is realistic? How about living within our means? How about balancing income and outgo, revenue and expenditures, same as every family and small business must do? What would it take to get there?
We would have to cut about 2 Trillion dollars of annual spending. Is that possible?
First, let’s remember the last budget was 2019 when Trump was in office. Starting in 2020, Congress ramped up spending to cover the extraordinary costs of fighting a world-ending epidemic of Covid. Leaving aside the possibility that Covid was merely an excuse to promote absentee ballots to steal the election, the spending never stopped. Every year since 2020, Congress passed a continuing resolution which keeps spending the same amount of money as before, plus a little extra for inflation, including the emergency money for Covid and lately, money for Ukraine to the tune of a third-of-a-trillion dollars. Surely some of that can go.
Second, let’s remember that Congress gives money to agencies to promote vague policy objectives like “safe food” or “transportation.” What, specifically, the agency does with that money is up to the bureaucrats. That’s why we get drag queen shows on military bases. Surely some of that can go.
Third, let’s remember that every bureaucrat knows the first rule of budgeting is “spend it or lose it.” They will hide behind a “hostage puppy” to protect the rest of their funding (so named for the famous National Lampoon cover). They will insist that if we cut the funding for drag queens, the puppy will die, the child in Ethiopia will starve, the meat will not be inspected, the Washington Monument will be closed, and Grandma will have to eat dog food to survive. We have heard it all before, surely they can’t expect us to fall for it again?
So what do we do? First, we don’t fall for the hostage puppy, we stand firm. If bureaucrats would rather let the Ethiopian kid starve than give up their drag queen shows, on their heads be it. Second, we empower someone to look through agency budgets to cut out silliness to focus on core functions. Musk’s team is doing that now but it ought to be a full time job for somebody. Third, we insist on real cuts now, not gimmicks like “out year” reductions 10 years down the road. And most importantly, we get tough – we harden our hearts – so we can ride out the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the rending of garments, the accusations of every -ism imaginable.
Why this fight? Why now? Because we’re nearly at the end of the road. We’re short about $2 Trillion a year which we borrowed to get by, but that’s been going on for so long we now owe $36 Trillion dollars which is more than the entire Gross Domestic Product of $26 Trillion. Do you realize what that means? It means we owe more on the national debt than the value of all the goods and services produced in the entire nation.We pay more for interest on the national debt than the entire defense budget.
By every reasonable measure, the United States is bankrupt.
It comes down to surgical cuts now or default on our debts later and then everything collapses into complete anarchy. Choose wisely. And demand that your elected representatives do the same.
Joe Doakes
One of the upshots of Americans (induced) economic illiteracy is that if they’ve gotten any education in economics at all, it’s been in Keynesianism. As such, they think the natural, effective response to an economic downturn is to pour taxpayer money into the situation.
Which merely stretches out the natural recovery, as it did in 1933, and in 2008.
In an economy with healthy fundamentals, a sharp downturn in a free market serves to kill off a whole lot of bad ideas – unsustainable dotcoms in 2001, subprime mortgages in 2008, and probably a whole lot of bubble-like irrational exuberance over AI today.
Now – are we as a society smart enough to know this? The fact that the Obama regime went back to subsidizing subprime mortgages after the ’08 recession (which their policies dragged out for years) indicates “probably not”.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.