Posted on 02/13/2018 9:17:09 PM PST by lowbuck
President Trump unveiled a budget Monday that seeks $3 trillion in cuts over the next decade.
What a difference a week makes.
The president signed a bill authorizing increases in domestic spending to secure larger increases in defense spending last week. This followed a State of the Union address petitioning Congress for various spending hikes, including $200 billion in federal funds for a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan. This week, he targets 12 departments for cuts.
The Departments of Agriculture (-16 percent), Commerce (-6 percent), Education (-10.5 percent), Energy (-3 percent), Health and Human Services (-21 percent), Housing and Urban Development (-18.3 percent), Interior (-16 percent), Justice (-1.2 percent), Labor (-21 percent), State (-26 percent), Transportation (-19 percent), and Treasury (-3 percent) all endure cuts. Defense (+13 percent), Homeland Security (+8 percent), and Veterans Affairs (+11.3 percent) receive increases under the plan. . . snip
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Well worth the 2-3 minutes to go to the article and read in full. Enjoy
For a long time my Presidential vote was chosen for the guy I disliked the least. I voted for Prez. Trump wholeheartedly and he’s more than living up to my expectations.
Maybe he's eliminating it altogether. I can dream, can't I?
Will read it
Think of it as a dynamic process...like compound interest
Budget cuts result in canceled "busy work" programs, reduction in regulations and lower gobmint staff levels = lower gobmint wage bill and higher growth of non gobmint businesses.
So expect a second and third round of cuts until all the dead wood is trimmed off.
From the comments:
Time to look at this body count of Trump Accusers: The Election Director Comey was fired. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was forcibly retired. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was reassigned and demoted. FBI general counsel James Baker resigned. Senior agent Peter Strzok was reassigned and demoted. The former FBI director’s chief of staff, James Rybicki, resigned. Mike Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, took retirement. Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was reassigned and demoted. Justice Department’s counterintelligence head, David Laufman, resigned. A cadre of others “unexpectedly” have left, allegedly (or conveniently) for private-sector jobs. Such career implosions do not happen without cause.
Education should be eliminated also.
Ten year plans in DC are low-brow humor, like the old Soviet five and ten year plans.
The ten year plans of ten years ago had a balanced budget or a surplus this year....enough said.
Elimination would mean 100 percent now, not 10-15 percent over the next 10 years.
Having been involved in various capacities of military contracting for thirty-five years, I contend it is possible to spend significantly less money on the military while improving equipment quality, quantity and availability across the board. Military contracts are larded with political agenda items, social justice actions and a host of other things like environmental idiocy. Then there is the way equipment is bought. You might get a multi-year 500 unit award, but the money to pay for it is authorized every year. This prevents any supplier from automating to save on the per unit cost. Essentially, most US equipment is built like it will be the one and only; by hand with limited dedicated support equipment. Another issue is the rules about design. On most of the projects I worked on the many component parts were mostly obsolete and unavailable for purchase when we finally started ramping up for manufacture. This is because of the “we-don’t-want-any-newfangled-stuff” only stuff that’s been made for x years already. During the design cycle whole types of technologies can come and go. Then there are the periodic cost cutting measures that do exactly the opposite, like the “we’re going to use commercial equipment because it’s cheaper.” Yeah, it’s cheaper because it was designed to sit in an air-conditioned room, not bop around the sky making two-G turns.
I am retired now and still frustrated.
As long as baseline budgeting is still being used, nobody’s serious about cutting the budget.
Wrong - Rather think of it as a fraud where Kongress promises to do something in the future without the slightest binding constraint to do so and with EVERY historic precedent where promised future budget cuts (and those weren't really cuts, but only decreases in the rate of increase) NEVER EVER occur. Kongress budgets yearly future promises mean NOTHING.
Appreciate your comments and relate to your frustration.
In another life, I was on the other side, as an active duty pilot. Oh, the waste. I still recall going out to “burn gas” so we used it by the end of the quarter. And that was the “small potatoes”.
We could not get a decent navigation system as we are being tasked to fly into a semi-war zone. So we borrowed a portable GPS unit from one of our boating buddies. Passed it from flight crew to flight crew.
That's one reason I went back to “civee street”.
Like you I am retired, but, more or less have let the frustration go. Now it is what passes for management in the civilian world that drives me up the wall.
“Like you I am retired, but, more or less have let the frustration go.”
The frustration doesn’t bother me on a daily basis, but I find myself commenting on the situation at every opportunity. I feel like if I can just get the word out that maybe somebody who can make a difference might see it and change something. I realize that’s ridiculous. This kind of abuse has been going on forever. Today you can buy a genuine Civil War muzzle-loading rifle called a Zouave. They are in amazing condition because they were obsolete at the time they were ordered. Congress knew this but insisted on the contract order before they’d sign off on the military’s other needs. So they were made and spent the next fifty to seventy five years in a warehouse.
The funding for my company’s project was held up until they approved a harebrained scheme cooked up by a company called something like “Spraycooling.” The idea was to use commercial equipment in a military application. It proved so much more costly to do that the whole project was eventually cancelled. Even though the rest of the project worked fine. Spraycooling had relocated their plant into the district of the guy who could hold up our funding.
I could go on with other examples, but I must go off to deal with reality now. Good luck with your civilian management.
I worked for LMSC back in the 80s and 90s. There was a reverse problem on one program. It was for a ground-based system, but designed by a satellite designer, who insisted that every board be conformal coated, just like their flight hardware. I asked him what power supplies they were putting into the system and he told me, COTS Lambda units.
I asked him why he was specifying conformal coating on our boards and putting them next to the non-conformal coated Lambda units? He had the absolute gall to tell me that we only made conformal coated hardware and he was demanding that Lambda do the same!
You cannot adjust someone’s frame of reference when they are stuck on stupid!
Any cuts last year one are meaningless.
Planned Parenthood, PBS, and student loan guarantees should be low hanging fruit.
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