Posted on 03/04/2013 4:47:41 AM PST by IbJensen
If you had to cut your family’s budget, where would you cut?
Would you immediately start starving your children and stop wearing shoes? Of course not. You would look at the extras in your life—whether they were coffee shop lattes, movie tickets, or restaurant meals.
It’s a good thing the President wouldn’t be handling your budget. As Dan Holler of our sister organization, Heritage Action for America, has said: “If President Obama were making the decision for your family… he’d tell you to stop buying gas for your car and explain how you could only eat five days a week.”
Now that President Obama has turned against sequestration, he is suggesting that spending cuts to federal agencies must result in dire consequences. Firefighters, emergency responders, and teachers will all be cut, he claims. Media outlets have played up these sob stories, copying White House releases in their local news stories and soliciting sad testimonials from people who supposedly would be affected by these cuts.
But the question remains: Why would federal agencies cut their most vital assets instead of trimming around the edges? After all, the sequestration cuts are only 2.4 percent of federal spending.
Take a couple of examples.
President Obama said that “Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country.”
It won’t come as a surprise to most Americans that there is waste and inefficiency at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). In fact, a congressional report “found that TSA is wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.” Another report found that the TSA “has continually grown its ranks despite fewer travelers.”
President Obama said that “Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off.”
First of all, as Heritage researchers have pointed out, “No federal education program operated by the Department of Education directly funds teacher salaries—this is a state and local responsibility.” And there are plenty of programs where inefficiencies are burdening our education system. A congressional report listed a number of duplicative or ineffective education programs that could be cut.
As if these exaggerations weren’t enough, Reason.com reported that the Office of Management and Budget warned of sequestration cuts to an agency that doesn’t even exist. As Reason’s Mike Riggs noted, this raises questions about the accuracy of the Administration’s attempted impact statements.
There is one area where the sequestration cuts will have harsher impacts—national defense. Heritage has warned of the impact on military readiness and America’s ability to defend itself, because defense bears a much larger portion of the cuts than the rest of the budget. The President is now acting concerned about the military after paying it little mind throughout the sequestration debate, using a shipyard as his backdrop for today’s anti-sequestration pep talk.
It makes no sense to hit defense the hardest with these cuts, while sequestration leaves major entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicaid untouched. Congress should reprogram these spending cuts to target the waste and inefficiencies it has already identified in federal agencies—like those listed above. Heritage’s Patrick Louis Knudsen, the Grover M. Hermann Senior Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs, even helpfully outlined places to find $150 billion in spending cuts that would make a lot more sense.
So no, we don’t have to fire firefighters and teachers and airport screeners. What Congress should be doing is what every American family does—tightening its budget by cutting things that are unnecessary.
Stop all the awards and ceremonies, stop social research grants, government advertising, sell off surplus buildings and land, allow drilling and mining with royalties to government on govt. lands, provide incentive for managers to save $ rather than spend $, repeal laws and regs that increase contracting costs, repeal Davis-Bacon, institute scientific inventory controls, make supplies conservation a factor in compnesation/promotiion.The biggest savings that would improve efficiency would be to allow managers to fire deadwood.
Eliminate EPA, DOE, TSA, FED. Combine the leftist think tank known as the CIA into the FBI. Clean the Pentagon and the rest of the military of civilian workers. There is no job a uniformed military personnel can't perform. Make tests for admission to the armed forces tougher and get females out of combat situations and then kick out all the homosexuals.
Sell the TVA
Gee: That would make sense.
I don’t look for that to happen.
Obama wants to cut the things that hurt the most people in order to make his point and have the Congress cave in to him.
Alaska was called Seward's Folly when I was in school. Now it's an untouchable, Federal, pristine wasteland...and that's the way the Feds like it.
Where to cut? This would be a good place to start...http://www.usa.gov/directory/federal/index.shtml
why not IPO the TVA?
same with many other departments. could be privatized.
Perhaps the useless House Republicans in the GOPe could quit playing small ball and defund Obama Care? They have the power to defund it, but they piss and moan over 2 cents out of a dollar in cuts while Obama transforms America! Might be a start. However as long as they are concerned with winning elections nothing will happen!
Entitlements, both unearned (TANF, Food Stamps, Medicaid, ObamaCare) and earned (Medicaid, Social Security).
These are exactly the programs that are killing us, and exactly the programs that are EXEMPT from Sequestration.
Talk about mild reform to Social Security and Medicare around here, though, and expect a full out attack.
Well, it "might" be in order to maximize the negative impact to/on voters, so that they will be more willing to vote to raise taxes. ALL levels of government are guilty of using this tactic.
Let's talk about serious reform to welfare, food stamps, Obamacare, etc.
I would also suggest that until these actions are done, Congress and the Executive branch - who are both failing miserably at their jobs - not be paid one cent of salary. Additionally, if these actions are not taken, that none of them are eligible for re-election, nor to hold public federal office ever again.
There are actually a lot of jobs that military members can't perform. The civilians are there as continuity. Military active duty personnel move around too much. Civilians typically stay at one location their whole careers. At a lot of locations the civilians are the ones that do the training and keep the mission flowing smoothly.
It sounds good to say cut civilians but that is really not such a cost effective idea. A lot of the depot work was always done by civilians. You would have to create new career fields, train and recruit to replace the civilians in these slots. This would take years to accomplish. Not really a savings.
It's also prime for oil and has probably been mortgaged acre by acre to the Chinese for illegal campaign monies over the years...
Just a thought of mine...
That list is just the tip of the iceberg. There are branches of agencies within those agencies.
For instance do we REALLY need this:
Funny, I don’t see a Mens Bureau but I do see a Womens Bureau.
Pathetic.
What you suggest has already been done, several times I believe.
I would cut the portions of the budget that pay for alternative energy. While not a cut, I would put the money spent on alternative transportation back into roads and bridges.
Milpers don't HAVE to move around so much. The civilians have about as much effect on the morale of the qualified uniforms as do homosexuals having been placed atop a pedestal as some honored species.
You mentioned “Clean the Pentagon and the rest of the military of civilian workers.” Remember that most of those civilian workers will have to be replaced with active duty military personnel to do the jobs. The growth of civilians in the DoD was meant as a way to let the active duty military focus its manpower on the combat mission, not working daily administrative stuff in the Pentagon and other military bases. Also, it means that contractors are hired to work in the mess halls as KPs instead of detailing soldiers to do that work every day.
You have overseas billets that have to be filled. These posts are filled by active duty. The civilian slots overseas are few and far between.
Active duty are subject to deployments. Only some civilians are deployable and it’s usually voluntary.
Your idea about the effect of civilians on morale is twisted. Civilians are a small fraction of the work force at most bases. Some bases your backbone is all civilian. Some civilians can be pains just like some military.
When an entire unit deploys, the civilians are the ones who keep the home station mission running.
Stop sending money to middle eastern barbarian savage countries.
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