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http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2015/01/12/buckleys-modest-proposal-would-erase-18-percent-of-the-federal-budget/
I thought he said, "a billion" here, there.
We need a CEO for president.
This is what I would say qualifies as an actual “dream act”. That is, it’ll never get past the dream phase. The bastards don’t work for us anymore and they know there isn’t a damned thing we will do about it.
“A large portion of that spending should never have been permitted because giving money to state and local governments is not among the powers granted to Congress.”
Neither is taking money from one person and giving it to another, yet they do it to the tune of trillions of dollars every year.
There’s some cherry picking on the examples of “wasteful spending”, but a lot of it is basic stuff that the feds use as a lever against state governments: highway funds, education, healthcare. A lot of this money is wasteful as well, as it gets spent on things that actually are unwanted by the states (e.g. Michelle Obama’s school lunch plan), but a lot of it is (due to law at both levels) part of policy implementation. The states couldn’t even come close to replacing that money. This will have to be fixed piecemeal.
If states weren’t being bribed with their own money they might start to reassert some of those 10th amendment rights. Fedscum would never allow that to happen.
One id like to see is to stop all interest payments to the Federal reserve. They create “dollars” out of thin air, and loan them to the US government. It should either be nationalized, or walked away from.
With one fell swoop, the US Govt could do what the fed does for free.
There is no need to pay a private bank to do what the constitution says the government should do for itself.
The Scottish Jurist and Historian Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler published a collection of lectures in 1801. He advanced a theory of democracy based on historical observation:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist only until voters discover that they can vote themselves largesses from the public treasury. From that time on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
“The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.”
Would be a good START.
The trend lately in the FEDGOV is to do whatever you want, and then make the other branches take some action to stop you; if they dare. And then they don't dare. And so on and so forth. The Constitution is only as good as it is obeyed. It never really had a mechanism of enforcement.
don’t forget grants and funds for non-government orgs and stuff
like PBS, NPR and Planned Parenthood.
Federal money is a drug and the States need a 12 step program!
Ev Dirksen was perhaps our finest Senate leader and might be the last good Senator ever elected from Illinois.