So you’re in favor of: loose nukes; roving gangs of uneducated, unemployed, sickos; and cancer. 
Off the top of my head if we eliminated Social Security, Medicare, and the DoD we might get a 50% budget reduction. And an unmitigated disaster. This is why solving real-world political problems is hard. To you, the EPA is a pain in the ass and a waste. To me, fond as I am of breathing, it’s a necessity. To many conservatives, DoD is untouchable. While DoD (indirectly) pays my salary, I am confident that cuts can be made with minimal affect on readiness. It will “just” take a lot of careful re-thinking of priorities and procedures. A lot. Former Secretary Gates talked about this, but he’s gone. None of it is going to be easy, when you’re talking a out taking someone’s “rice bowl” away.
It looks like you’ve offered a one-line solution to the problem (at least for solving it in your mind). Remind you of anything?
Eat the poor.
Well, it’s one line that takes a hard problem and breaks it down into, by my estimate, three other hard problems, and two relatively easy problems (and that’s being very generous). Saying that solving poverty requires fixing education and healthcare isn’t providing an easy solution to the poverty problem. I mean, if that’s all it takes, why don’t we say that the solution to every problem is to fix that problem?
Poverty? Fix poverty.
War? Get rid of war.
Rising health care costs? Stop health care costs from rising.
Pollution? Pollute less.
(Oh, wait, you actually used that last one.)
Without reducing pollution, how do you solve that problem?
What the fuck? What if the parents are poor as well? What if people decide to have kids (all it takes are two people and a relatively flat surface) without funding the trust? What do you do, kill the kid?
I mean, that’s certainly a possible solution - kill the poor. Simple, too. Would probably work. I don’t think I like it very much, though.
Have a look at these images from the '70s, and then tell me we don’t need the EPA.
Reducing pollution is obviously necessary to achieve the goal of reducing pollution. Since we accept that pollution is a hard problem, simply saying “solve it” isn’t an easy solution. How do you reduce pollution? That’s the hard part. I don’t think there are any easy solutions to that.
Raise whose taxes by 10%, and cut spending on what? Specifically.
If this is your solution, what do you think the problem is? Your solution is exactly what everyone is trying to avoid.
People are having fewer children, yes. That does not mean the world population is decreasing, just that it’s increasing more slowly than it was a decade ago. And even if it stayed at approximately the same level for eternity, we’re still going to run out of oil eventually. Incidentally, most people would prefer a better solution than “Wait until the lack of resources causes enough people to die so that equilibrium is reached”.
Oh my god, how come no one thought of this? Could it be that “pollute less” is the hard problem?
How about we just nuke the whole country? That’s a simple solution too.
I made the cut gov’t spending in half bumper sticker comment to show that the O.P.'s “simple solution” isn’t everyone’s “simple solution” implying it’s not so simple after all. It wasn’t an argument that 50% cuts alone is best.
On the other hand, there is waste in all the above areas you mention, and that could be cut out to some extent.
Have you seen a map of Afghanistan? Are you aware of the size of the place and its baroque topography? Just how many special forces are there to go around? Finally: recruitment. It might take someone with a bit of know-how to make an IED, but probably doesn’t take a huge amount of skill to plant one, and there is no shortage of expendable angry people in Afghanistan, and more are being created every day.
The Controvert you’re pretty good at easy fixes. Thank goodness you’re never going to be in charge of anything.
Thank you for reassuring me that you are not seriously advocating a 50% cut in government spending. I took you seriously because there ARE people in America who would propose that.
As the old saying goes, wasteful government spending is money the government spends on somebody else but me. No, wait a second. That isn’t an old saying. I just now made it up. But I like it:D
Seriously, while there might be a few items that all of us would agree are wasteful, you would be amazed how many disagreements there would be. Money for the arts is wasteful you say? An artist might tell you to shut your piehole, that he pays much more in taxes than you do, and that spending on the arts is a damned sight better than buying arms to blow the heads off kids in Afghanistan. What do you think of that?
I am reminded of a sign a guy had on his office wall where I used to work. I believe he was in Information Technology. The sign said:
Good
Fast
Cheap
Choose any two!
When it comes to problem solving, that about says it all.
His argument is not reasonable. Wasting money on something that is useless might be less bad than wasting money on something that is actively harmful, but that does not mean it is good.
Ice floes. 
Art is useless? By whose definition? Defining waste by saying “don’t pay for anything useless” just pushes the problem back a step; who gets to define “useless”?
There is a reason these “hard problems” haven’t been solved. Think about it for a moment. If it’s because the smartest and brightest on the planet couldn’t think of the solution, maybe it’s not as simple as you think. If it’s because the people working on the problem aren’t willing/able to use the solutions proffered for some reason, then that’s its own very real, very serious problem, without a quick fix.
For example, raising taxes and cutting spending is clearly the only real solution to the debt crisis in the USA, but at the same time, you have congressmen unwilling to cut spending on things within their own constituencies, and nobody wants to be left holding the bag if we have to cut something like, say, Social Security to make ends meet. Similarly, nobody wants to be the guy who gets slammed as the tax-man. What’s the solution to that?
There’s a reason that complex problems with seemingly “simple” solutions are still kicking around: what seems simple and obvious to laymen with no understanding of the subject reveals itself to be an almost unsolvable issue to those who understand the full implications of the problem at hand. “Pollute less” seems like a simple solution, but it’s not one which is simple in any way, shape, or form to really use – this is why it’s called a hard problem in the first place.
Such simplistic thinking is simply not a good idea. Yes, we need solutions. But 99% of the time, they’ll be coming from experts, not laypeople.
Make me a congressman. I’ll vote to raise taxes for the good of the country. After I’ve helped put the country on the mend, I’ll be happy to be voted out by the people I’ve helped.
If you say I can’t define something as “useless”, what gives you the right to define something as “art that deserves to be funded with taxpayer money”?
How is this any better than any other pork-barrel project?
The fact that some people agree with me, or at least that it’s good to have government funding of the arts instead of forcing artists to depend wholly on corporations and churches.
Zactly. If there is no way to define worthless/useless/less worthy than something else then its just pork barrels all the way down.