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.
Want places to cut:
Most foreign aid. Especially to countries who hate us.
Eliminate some federal agencies (DHS, EPA, TSA, Education, Anything dealing with public TV, etc.)
We managed just fine without those agencies, before, we can easily do it again.
That having been said, the "cut waste" approach is fraudulent. Not in the sense that the waste should not be cut - of course it should. But we need an immediate reduction (like in the next six months) of $1.2-1.5 trillion, and there is no question that (temporarily) that would be very, very painful. SO painful, in fact, that nobody who depends on votes to keep the best job they ever have had or will have will go for it.
Basically, we screwed.
Peeling potatoes and mopping mess hall floors is a great way to build character. Half of the pentagon personnel are civilians who couldn’t care a twit for military preparedness or America. Just give them an Obozo and they’re happy until retirement.
stop spending the money we have to borrow to spend. duh!
No $ to foreign countries, no planes to Egypt, Kick the UN off US shores and quit sending money to them. Aid from US should say USA not UN.
stop paying great benefits for one year as a Congress person. All congress should get the same medical we get, SS, medicare etc.
spend only what the constitution says is your business and leave the rest to the States. Repeal all laws that do not fit the Constitution.
Not one penny of domestic spending or our military should be cut until ALL foreign aid is suspended. I know this would be small compared to the problem but it MUST be the very first step and not a single person in the state run media mentions it nor on FOX for that matter.
Yes, it would be symbolic, but a strong symbolic gesture to the world, that the USA can no longer be pissed on by every tyrant dictator or socialist/communist redistributionist country and still expected to subsidize those failures.
To our few remaining allies, that the half-black one has not pissed off, sorry, but for now we are broke but you will be the first in line should we recover.
Then completely eliminate the Depts of Education and Energy.
Eliminate all funding for the arts and certainly NPR/PBS.
Then maybe the citizens, who are paying the freight for this runaway economic train, might feel a little better about tightening our own belts.
The Pentagon personnel does not represent all of the DOD civilians. A lot of the DOD civilan workforce is comprised of either retirees or ex active duty and they do care a lot about the US.
DOD personnel will not riot because of the cuts. Being ex military most will just soldier on and take less pay.
Close the DHS and you cut 25% off the budget and get rid of the police state at the same time.
Foreign aid is kind of tricky. From what I have heard the money given in aid comes back to the US anyway. We don’t give them free arms. They have to buy it and the follow on maintenance contracts have to be done by US or allies contractors.
This is also how non weapon aid works.
Nope...not a dime. Look it up.
The House has passed the bills but the senate did not take them up.
“Foreign aid is kind of tricky. From what I have heard the money given in aid comes back to the US anyway. We don’t give them free arms. They have to buy it and the follow on maintenance contracts have to be done by US or allies contractors.
This is also how non weapon aid works.”
Here we have our government trusting a bunch of genetically defective early off shoots of the primordial soup with F16s yet not trusting law abiding US Citizens with hand held weapons. Makes you wonder which side of the fence the US government is currently on and certainly the State Department (which contains the highest number of communists per capita of any government agency).
In actuality, the crony capitalism of which you speak is even more reason to completely eliminate foreign aid. My reasoning is, without exception, anything or organization that gets big becomes evil. Be it big government, big religion, big business they all abuse their power. However, when you allow government and business to partner with our political enemies you have a Lord Acton moment on steroids. [Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely]
I guess that polls better than the actual enumerated powers of the Federal government.
0bama budgeting - we eat fillet mignon and lobster and caviar for 350 days out of the year - but the last 15 days they STARVE!!!!
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