Posted on 05/11/2019 7:44:51 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
I think the time is coming for an idea that is so old that it is new again: cutting the Federal government in half.
The idea is: cancel all Federal welfare-type programs, including all means-tested welfare programs (apparently there are over 150 of them), all healthcare-related programs including Medicare and Medicaid, all education-related, arts-related and housing-related programs, and anything else of this sort -- in short, most everything except for the military, national parks, and maybe some public works. Social Security could eventually be reformed to a system of private retirement accounts, known as a "provident fund" system and in use today in over thirty countries.
No "block grants" or other such schemes. Just terminate the programs. This would make State governments responsible for all such welfare-type programs, to do as they see fit, and to impose taxes appropriately to pay for them. Give them twelve months to get ready. States like California and Massachusetts would be free to introduce the single-payer healthcare system of their dreams, while other states, like Utah or Texas, might have more private-sector-based solutions. States are active in all of these spheres already.
For a long time, such proposals have been on the outer fringe of political possibility. We have been in a period of political stasis, where things haven't changed much. Basically, today we have a spending structure that was built in the 1960s and 1970s, and a tax structure that was built in the late 1980s/early 1990s, with a few minor tweaks along the way. In the meantime, other governments have had huge changes. Some abandoned centrally-planned Communism and adopted free-market capitalism . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Currently there are 2 million people that “work” for the federal government.That doesn’t include the military or the Post Office. That could be reduced to 1 million and no one would notice.
That would be nice, but should they cut them the long way or through the waist?
It all sounds great as they advocate for dismantling the programs seniors played by the rules to count on in their elder years, and they want to strip that away from them now when they have no other coverage.
Ah no!
The Depression you never heard of was in 1920-21. President Harding’s laissez-faire economic policies, combined with a coordinated aggressive policy of rapid government downsizing, had a direct influence on the rapid and widespread private-sector recovery.
Harding gets a bad rap. Government downsizing today would require civil war of some sort.
It would still be over-sized! But that would be a good START!
Like with a chain saw?
It’s too late to fix Medicare, social security and the like. Just punt it to the Dems. We tried to fix it. It’s their problem now.
Send them a check?
Here’s a shout out to the person from France who donated, wow is right, had no idea that liberty was still popular there.
“https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10935/Warren";
No wonder that you present as a Dr. [of arcane political trivia...].....
Good idea. Throw one half away and burn the other.
Now we are getting there.
XA lives!
That taking all the nonsense from Wilson on out to the curb just being talked about is comforting.
Give people a choice (so beloved by the Progs) to opt out of SS & Mcare.
Return the money extorted after deducting an insurance “corkage”.
Nope.
The very FIRST step is getting rid of all the illegal aliens.
If we make cuts FIRST, they’ll simply squander the savings on other stuff, e.g. benefits for illegals, or they’ll sponsor all their relatives, in which case we return to the beginning.
Get rid of illegals THEN cut Da Gummint in half.
OR
Return the money the employee paid in. The insurance “corkage” would be the remaining employer “contribution”.
Some good ideas here, but the only way to get them implemented is to make the first 50% cut a cut of all Democrats.
Democrats oppose lower taxes even when they result in increased Treasury revenues. They are insane. Democrats are hell-bent on punishing productivity and independence. Democrats only see wealth in terms of the government getting control of all natural resources and properties (in Marxist terms, the “means of production”). For them, these natural resources and properties are the only true wealth, and they want the state to own them and distribute the proceeds evenly to everyone except themselves, as they are entitled to a much bigger slice of the pie for administering this economic model. (The other exception to this even distribution is their weaponization of the government against their political opponents. And this includes trying to destroy them financially, as we are seeing more and more.)
But natural resources are useless without labor and innovation. The Marxist / Socialist model destroys all incentive to work or innovate. It always leads to the worst kinds of corruption and societal poverty. And then the mass killings begin.
Marxism can only be propped up with “other people’s money” for so long. When those other people run out of money, and the Marxists run out of more of these “other people,” the Marxists then have to cull the herd in order for limited resources to be spread around to fewer people.
While Free Enterprise and Capitalistic Market economies require some regulation in order to protect consumers and workers from abuses, this economic model rewards work and innovation. By protecting natural resources and other property from theft (especially by government bureaucrats) it encourages investment and greater and greater market efficiencies through innovation and economies of scale. Reduced corruption and theft also have a positive impact on the prosperity of members of such societies.
The facts of history—recent and not-so-recent—make these things clear. Socialism and Marxism do not work. Free enterprise does. Democrats are fixated on an idea and an ideology that has hypnotized them into ignoring these facts and even reality itself. To them the ideas of Socialism and Marxism are not “too good to be true,” they are so good they must be true.
We can try to break them out of the hysteria and psychosis with logic and reason. But, short of this, we are ever-increasingly likely to be required to use force to protect our liberties against the thieving Socialists. Thus, as I said, the first 50% cut we will have to make is to cut the Democrats out of the picture. Their ideology is a dead end and must be rooted out of our culture in order for our nation to survive.
Greece is very Proggy and has weather like FL.
For later
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