Posted on 01/19/2017 6:13:56 AM PST by pabianice
Donald Trump is ready to take an ax to government spending.
Staffers for the Trump transition team have been meeting with career staff at the White House ahead of Friday’s presidential inauguration to outline their plans for shrinking the federal bureaucracy, The Hill has learned.
The changes they propose are dramatic.
The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.
Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump’s team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
I think Trump has “Your Fired” down pat.
Thank you for both. I have no excuse.
It’s going to take an impasse (government shutdown! government shutdown!) to do this.
I think Trump is up to it.
It’s more a practical than a conservative budget, the cuts mostly are in what most people consider luxuries. The Civil Rights and such special interest pandering programs cuts will make for fun political theater!
“Ten years is someone else’s administration.”
Mike Pence’s
someone else’s....third base.
Vent all you like about the National Endowment for the Arts, but the real money will come from cuts in baseline health care expenditures, raising (over time) the Social Security retirement age to 70 (which I favor), going to a chained CPI inflation measure for all government programs, including Social Security COLA's (which I favor), and means testing initial benefits for new Social Security beneficiaries (which I do not favor). Again, poke all the fun you like at the NEA, but pay attention to where the dollars are.
The Executive Summary is here: http://rsc-walker.house.gov/files/Initiatives/FY17%20RSC%20Budget%20Summary%203-16-16%20PDF.pdf
This is not the same baseline the Trump team is apparently working from, but it is one of the main underlying conservative budgets that was incorporated into the mix.
Congratulations, President Trump!!!
For reductio ad absurdum... Let's just say that there was a gov't agency in charge of lifesaving medicine for children, and naming buildings after Barack Obama. Budget cuts come. What piece gets chopped?
The medicine for children, of course. People will holler, kids will die, and the line item will get added back into the budget. If they cut "The Committee to Name Things After Barack", most people would say "Fair Enough" and the rest would wonder why there was committee to do that in the first place.
Thus, the government bureaucrats maintain their budget fiefdoms.
I'll be properly excited when it comes to fruition. Man, I'd love to see CPR and the NEA get chopped, I'd be first in line to cheer. I'm just not optimistic.
Trump explicitly put entitlement cuts off in his campaign.
Entitlement cuts are neccesary very soon but are so difficult that I think they deserve their own election- meaning they should be the focus of an election.
So that there is some consensus. They should not be ‘rammed down the voters throats’.
After 2018, 2020 at the latest, they should be addressed.
*
You are wrong. Trump alone of all the Republican candidates has the leadership skills to compel Congress to do what needs to be done.
I think that the entitlements need to be culled of all of the added beneficiaries which were not in the original program. That would include SS and Medicare and Medicaid. Disability claims included. I am a believer in thrift and have low tolerance for waste. Therefore, the government needs to clean house inclusive of smaller overreaches which invariably expand with time. No bonus payouts for a govt job. Employees do their best and no reward for that. Lots of already political payouts which have worked their way into govt salaries.
$10.5 trillion is a serious number. I would support a package of spending cuts of this magnitude. If we are serious about dealing with our long term fiscal situation before we go into the ditch, this would be a good start. BUT ... $10.5 trillion in cuts over ten years necessitates big cuts in entitlements. We CANNOT get there otherwise. Over 60 percent of the federal budget is entitlements, and that is where the growth is. Defense is the biggest piece of discretionary spending, and Trump (correctly) wants to increase that, to begin undoing some of the damage of the Obama era.
I have no idea what will eventually emerge, but if they are talking cuts of this magnitude, they MUST go after entitlements. On non-defense discretionary spending, there will be a blizzard of proposed cuts, most of them small. But to illustrate the problem: I've been scanning the RSC proposal. Most of the cuts in non-defense discretionary spending, I can happily support. There are a couple that would cause me real heartburn, and that I think are frankly misguided even from a hard core conservative perspective. If I were in Congress, I would swallow hard and vote for the package as a package, but if it begins to unravel, I would go to bat for my pet programs as well. And if entitlements are off the table, my motivation to support a painful package would be severely lessened, as pissant savings from a grab bag of small federal programs, many of them very useful, are simply irrelevant if we don't tackle the real budget drivers.
Go big or go home. If we don't tackle entitlements, we're not being serious, or credible, or honest. Yes, Trump took entitlements off the table during the campaign. This was one of the many reasons that so many from the congressional wing of the party, as well as the "intellectual" wing, had trouble coming to terms with Trump. We had a Republican nominee who blithely ignored the arithmetic. For people who have spent their lives crunching numbers, and who believe this may be our last chance, that's an issue.
Of course, Trump ignoring the math is one of the reasons the Democrats had trouble with him as well. Democrats were not used to a Republican candidate who looked at a $19 trillion debt and said it was a good time to borrow more money, or who looked at an actuarially bankrupt Social Security program, and said "hands off." Trump's rhetoric on these questions was every bit as irresponsible as the standard Democrat line. So ... it's time for Trump to stop being a loose cannon, and look at the numbers.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth increases!
Make it pay per view & pay down some of the debt....
Music to my ears. Go, Trump!
Whenever there is over 2 inches of SNOW in Washington, DC, all “non-essential” workers are told to stay home. Then, only about 6% of workers show up & work.
SOOOOO—How many non-essential workers are there? TOO DAMN MANY. Let them see if they have any skills to work in the private sector & get paid a much lower wage.
President Trump and Congress should seriously consider this a first step in cutting entitlement spending.
I remember, vaguely, hey, I’m old, but the Dept of Commerce got handed the census duties once Obummer got in, and the census report we had to complete was disgraceful. Obummer, who was so anti-racist supposedly, put out a horrible census, wanting to know every bit of everybody’s ancestry. I’m Scotch/Irish, born in Scotland, but every question about my ancestry I answered “American”. It was so intrusive, unconstitutional, and none of their business and I think may have been a ploy to gather info to stir up racial problems. And a girlfriend, equally older, got the huge form to fill in wanting to know if she was pregnant before marriage, what her income was, etc., and refused to fill it in and was threatened with jail until she finally agreed many months later. It was disgusting. Sooooo, anything to limit the Commerce Dept. suits me.
An across-the-board 10% pay cut on all federal employees/officials (with no sacred cows) effective April 1st would be a good start. Then it should be done again effective October 1st. Same goes for federal contracts. Also do the same on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and any other entitlement payments for all services starting April 1st and October 1st but on those at 5% for April and 5% for October. The federal government has been running huge deficits for the past 16 years and its time to stop/reverse the red ink.
I’d propose doing it immediately but with all the unintended consequences (i.e. child support, alimony, mortgage, car payment, student loan payment, etc monthly obligations that so many people have to make) its important to give a little bit of time, but not a whole lot, for people to prepare to adjust.
Trump wants to renew and rebuild the DoD. I don't know that he said he wants to spend more money. My understanding is that he wants to start by getting something for what we spend - like cutting the cost of the F35 or finding and alternative. Cutting back the cost of AF-1 to something reasonable.
You cannot pour more money into the bloated bureaucratic sclerotic DoD acquisition process and get anything but more bloat and D.C. beltway banditry.
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