I’m honestly not sure how you come to this conclusion. Again, I don’t have any indication that you know what any of these departments actually do. Especially when you say things like this:
I mean, what, you think the government hires large numbers of people to sit in a room and make fart noises with their mouths all day? The DoJ is responsible for the recent family separation program. It’s responsible for the ongoing criminal investigation into the president. It was responsible for a program investigating police corruption and abuse (a program that found a whole lot of abuse!) up until Sessions shelved it. It is responsible for prosecuting federal crimes and representing the executive branch in court. These are not small things, and that’s just one of the agencies shut down (luckily, most of this will continue without appropriations). HUD does section 8 housing, and currently can’t process new requests. For people in need of housing assistance, that’s gonna hurt like hell, and may lead to increasing homelessness in the winter. The IRS would delay filing tax returns and refunds if the shitdown drags on - that matters to quite a few people. The SEC can’t open new cases - seems potentially quite dangerous to basically pass white collar crime a blank check. And so on and so forth. This is the kind of short-sightedness that gets to me. You’d think after you floated a plan that would cut 2-10 times the budget of each department, you might learn a bit of epistemic humility…
To quote a great fictional man, “Wow. Everything you just said was completely wrong.”
Al Qaeda got lucky 17 years ago. TSA has not stopped a single threat since then and has allowed several others to board as well as continuously failing in testing. Between locking the cockpit door and a change in passenger behavior, you’ll never see another successful airline hijacking. Frankly, I’ll take my chances with a full reversion to previous security measures.
Yes, Clinton was out of office when the dot-com bubble popped, and when the largest terrorist attack in US history, which was planned on his watch, came about. Fortunately, the GOP controlled Congress, and rejected Clinton’s budgets, which had $200B deficits as far as the eye could see.
Did you have anything to say about the OP?
The government spends a lot of money we don’t have. We shouldn’t spending that money.
No, it’s not.
:shrugs: Like I said, we aren’t going to do any of this. Liberals won’t stand for it.
His point is not that complicated; he’s saying it’s lazy to advocate cutting budgets by some abitrary, across the board percentage, as if you already know that this percentage is expendable. Makes as much sense as the CEO of a Fortune 500 blindly laying off 25% of its staff just to increase the profit margin. Sure, boss, that will lower your overhead costs significantly, but probably at the expense of productivity.
I’d say Agriculture. Assistance programs could be moved to HUD, research and land management could be moved to Interior, safety could be moved to the FDA, and subsidies could be largely eliminated.
But that happens all the time. At a high level, executives aren’t going to be mucking around with line item expenses. But there are targets to hit both on revenues and expenses. Setting a cut target seems entirely normal to me.
On come on, UPS cutting 25% of their marketing budget is a lot different than cutting 25% of their operations budget. One is going to take years to be felt, the other is going to cause immediate chaos. A good CEO isn’t going to get into line items but they’re also not going to make blanket targets without talking to their senior staff and making some educated choices.
To the OP, I voted for a couple of departments but I may not have understood the spirit of the question. As much as I want to see DHS go back to how it used to be, shutting it all down like they did on the 22nd and never spinning it back up is obviously dumb. If that’s what you meant, then take my votes away.
Yes, obviously there is nuance, and the level at which the haircuts are made are important. I guess I’m not sure what the point of contention is. If it’s haphazardly scuttling major departments that the government was designed around is a bad idea, ok yes. If it’s, no generalized haircuts can be made because the concept itself is a bad idea…then I disagree.
I didn’t vote for any because I don’t think cutting departments 100% on a sporadic haphazard basis is good governance. But I would like to cut a shit ton out of everything.
You think it’s normal to just make up a percentage target without knowing what the risks are? If an agency is already struggling to keep up with demands, overslashing its budget could make matters worse.
Setting a target isn’t random, nor is it devoid of knowledge of risks. Why add this condition? As a threshold matter, first there needs to be either agreement or understanding that setting targets or benchmarks is very normal. Doing so blindly or just picking levels out of a hat is not. Yes, over cutting an agency that performs a critical function could be bad. Yay for the obvious.
But things like the fed targeting 2% inflation, or having a spending target (sliced in various ways) as a percent of GDP, those are not necessarily bad things. If the cuts are in all the wrong places, sure. But the target itself then is not the problem. First we have to agree that a target can be a good thing.
I agree DHS is grossly bloated - was a boondoggle since its inception. Of course, some meaningful services/functions have been folded into it, but they could be dispersed elsewhere - or keep it as a much smaller focused Agency.
Ag is a promising target. Farm subsidies are essentially corporate welfare, and having Ag responsible for food/nutrition is horrendous. Disperse it to Commerce and HHS.
Of course, the greatest savings could be had from Defense. Unless one considered a large portion of military spending as a form of welfare.
In my experience, folk generally tend to considerable expendable those aspects of government that they perceive OTHERS as benefitting from.
Bone - but the problem is setting arbitrary targets with no justification for why the target should be set in the first place.
Let’s say I’m a new police chief in town. My first act is to decree that I want to see 25% more arrests this year than last. Do you suppose this will result in good policy, perhaps by allowing my lieutenants and sergeants decide how they will increase arrests to best fulfill my unexplained desire to see arrests go up?
I have no problem with debates like what asterion has suggested, whether TSA is worth the money or not. One can look at the question and decide, and then have a basis to say whether Federal funding for that should be eliminated or not.
To reference a common gun rights argument, there’s often an annoyance that assault weapons are proposed to be banned because they look scary, or they just feeeeeeeel like bad things. If one sees that making a policy decision because of feeeeeelings is a bad thing, then that also must be true for simply saying that it feeeeeeeels like the government spends too much money so it has to be cut.
Who says it has to be based on feelings? If the current deficit is 4.5% of GDP, and the historical average is 3.2%, is it feelings to say we should set a target to be more in line with the historical average? If we can achieve that, then the next goal could be further reductions. A target is goal setting. I could easily be missing something because this seems really normal to me so I’m not understanding the opposition.
Yes, we could cut Ag subsidies. More or less to zero, IMHO.
DHS can cut ICE to bare bones.
With Putin showing off his new supersonic nukes, I am not sure now is the time to cut defense. I had thought we’d just about ended the arms race, then Putin and Kim keep pulling the whole world back in towards nuclear disaster.
I’m all for reducing the federal deficits and the national debt. But how about we look at things like getting rid of the penny and the nickel, as both cost more to produce than face value. Get rid of the one-dollar bill, to be replaced by a dollar coin (and consider larger value coins, such as perhaps a ten-dollar coin). Increase spending on IRS auditors to go after tax cheats, as I think such spending can be very profitable. Repeal the Trump tax cuts that benefit only the wealthy. Charge companies a realistic amount to drill for oil on national lands.