Posted on 03/21/2017 4:34:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
Everyone in Washington hates Donald Trump's new budget. So it must have something going for it. This is a budget plan that will surgically remove trillions of dollars of wasteful spending from the obese $3.9 trillion federal budget. Many agencies will have to live with cuts of 5, 10 and 30 percent, while other outdated, duplicative or unproductive programs will go to the graveyard.
It's a gutsy document that takes on the hoards of special-interest groups that populate Washington, D.C. The Washington metropolitan workforce will shrink, and so the town is in cardiac arrest. The Washington Post quoted an unnamed "official" who said that his fellow workers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development were feeling "demoralized." Boohoo. Then the anonymous bureaucrat added: "This is just a tough, tough time. HUD is no different than any other domestic agency in just feeling as though these cuts are all very arbitrary and unnecessary."
Well, maybe the workers at HUD now know how "demoralized" Americans feel about the way their agency misspends tax dollars.
No surprise here that Trump, who promised to drain the swamp, is getting resistance from the people who live in the swamp. The rest of America, outside the Washington Beltway, couldn't be more pleased.
The deep cutbacks in the State Department, foreign service and foreign aid have been met with particular scorn by liberals. But why? Americans have been saying for decades that they believe foreign aid is a waste of money. They're right. Some $50 billion of aid money has gone to sub-Saharan Africa and surrounding regions over the last 40 years and it has bought nothing.
The welfare industry is complaining about cuts to housing, energy, and community-development programs. They claim that the safety net for the working poor is being slashed. But the working poor don't want more community-development block grants, job training programs, legal aid and so on. They don't want handouts; they want jobs that bring real economic development. The Trump tax cuts and the regulatory relief that will bring back industries such as coal will have a much more positive impact on their lives than billions of dollars of federal assistance.
Welfare programs will be forced to become more efficient and less wasteful. The government's auditors at the Government Accountability Office recently found more than $110 billion annually in fraudulent and erroneous payments to claimants. No one has ever taken a serious stab at reducing fraud and cheating in Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, earned income tax credits and so on. Trump will.
Trump's budget, in short, is holding liberalism accountable for the trillions of dollars spent that have delivered pitiful results. The region of Appalachia has been showered with tens of billions of dollars in federal aid over the last 50 years, and inner cities have received hundreds of billions. Where are the jobs? Where is the development? Where are the good schools, the safe streets? Where is the community renewal? Why haven't minorities -- blacks and Hispanics, whose incomes still lag so far behind those of whites -- been lifted up?
When the welfare state was created, Lyndon Johnson said that the "days of the dole in this country are numbered." Fifteen thousand days and $10 trillion in welfare later, Americans don't like what all this has bought.
Trump wants to move our fiscal policies in a new direction that ends waste, demands accountability and more personal responsibility, funding only what has a proven track record of working. He wants to unplug government programs from their perpetual life machine. Government must become lean and efficient and customer friendly. It must begin to pay its bills.
Liberals believe this is radical and cruel. The rest of us think it is common sense.
Real cuts, or cuts to the baseline budget?
Trumps cuts are great but will congress have the spine to pull it off? My guess is that the congress will wring their hands and make sure they pass something that the democrats could support. Can’t upset the dems. That’s just not fair.
Well, there is an entire department that could be cut. Its mandate has no Constitutional authority. Nor should Republicans be afraid. Its clients never have and never will vote Republican. The Democrats will squeal but eliminating HUD will not hurt the Republicans.
I would settle for removing hundreds of billions of dollars of wasteful spending from the obese $3.9 trillion federal budget. For now.
Dead on.
Just kill it. No one needs it.
For example: Welfare is KNOWN to be only 27% efficient
That means for every 3 dollars that makes it to families, 7 are kept by the government.
Or, for each $100,000 spent on welfare, $30,000 goes to a family, and $70,000 is kept by the government.
That is the equivalent of one full-time government employee per family. LET THAT SINK IN.
If a business was allowed to keep $100,000 off his taxes he could hire someone from welfare AND the government bureaucrat for that same amount of money. Then the businessman would get $100K worth of PRODUCTION from the two of them, which he could then sell for a profit.
So instead of $100,000 flushed down the crapper for a loss to the economy, the businessman would have a product made for him that would presumably would be worth MORE THAN $100,000 so he could sell it for a profit- for a net GAIN of money.
EVERY SINLGLE DOLLAR SPENT on welfare is wasted, because you get no production from it.
The libtards will say that the welfare money allows them to buy goods and services, but that is a complete logical fallacy. If they got paid that same money from jobs instead of welfare they would be able to buy those same good and services. What is missing is the production of anything useful
It can be clearly demonstrated that those $100,000 lost are a drain on the economy. You either pay someone to sit on their ass or you pay them to produce something for you.
One is a net reduction in wealth - the other is a positive on many fronts... Two people get a PRODUCTIVE job, a businessman gets to use his money to make a profit, there is a product made, there is no useless ass-sitting with a full-time government minder making sure you sit on your ass, getting paid twice as much.
Mayor- do you still have contacts within the Trump team?
Yes but no ones listening
Give blacks the janitor jobs that are done by illegals. Nighttime-keeeps them out of trouble. Those working in high-rises can be given financial counseling by investment companies in the same building. Late afternoon just b4 the start of their shift.
wtf?
Are the RINO’s insulating him from external sources?
I think so. That job offer I got, well it disappeared as did Juls.
Too many establishment involved in transition teams that take care of their own useless people.
The same kind of people that we need to keep away from Trump.
You must be seeing a report that literally is cherry-picking the good departments.
I have seen the numbers when they add ALL the departments, and for every dollar sent in, literally, 12.3 cents goes to the people who are supposed to get it. It’s 87.7 to government waste, 12.3 to the people. That’s an ugly number and it is useless for us to keep spending it.
Literally, in 2009, there were 284 different federal organizations that did job retraining. Each one, if they contracted with a third-party vendor, had a different rate. So, while you could be using organization A, and they would pay $12,500 for a program, using organization B, you might pay $17,000 and organization C only pay $9,000, as an individual, you could come in and pay $5,500 and a business could come in and pay $3,000 for each employee. The amount of waste, fraud and abuse in the FedGov is sick.
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