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Cutting spending is SO MUCH more important than cutting taxes
Source: X.com (@TheRevAl)
“Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.” John Quinn
One reason that we are generally unsuccessful at trying to fix our political problems is that no one is trying to fix our political problems. Politicians are not motivated to fix problems because, if they ever did, we wouldn’t need them, and wouldn’t vote for them. Bureaucrats are even less motivated to fix problems – they don’t care who you vote for. Journalists and activists are even less motivated than that – they make a living off those problems.
The Civil Rights Act was passed 60 years ago, and “fighting racism” is still an effective campaign tactic. Climate Change is even better. When will the climate ever stop changing? My point is that we can’t get rid of these people by fixing the problems they promote. If we don’t like being lectured to by small-minded narcissists, then the only way to accomplish that is to decrease the power and influence of government. I suspect that Elon and Vivek have figured this out.
Many conservatives think that it’s extremely important to cut taxes. And I suppose that’s true, to a point.
But I think it’s much more important to reduce spending. Because whenever government spends money, it is exerting power. Removing money from the economy is unhelpful. Allowing government to spend money is dangerous.
Source CNN: Schumer and Pelosi respond to Trump’s 2019 national address on border security
I hope Trump cuts taxes. That would be nice. But cutting spending is so much more important. So, SO much more important.
You can’t “starve the beast” by cutting taxes. The government will just print more money, or borrow more money. It’s hard for a normal person to understand, but government is a type of budgeting in which inflow has nothing to do with outflow.
So if you want to cut government spending, all you can do is cut government. And the only way to do that, in my view, is by cutting entire departments.
If Trump cuts the budget of every federal agency in half, that would be swell, but the next Democrat president will reverse that, plus some, on his first day in office.
We must reduce the influence of government, or else government will get worse and worse, because it will need to create more and more problems to convince people to surrender their liberty and money to politicians. To reduce the influence of government, we must cut government spending. To do that, we must close down entire departments, firing thousands of government workers at a time.
Source: U.S. Air Force photo by Trevor Cokley
I don’t view this as difficult. I view it as impossible. As usual, I really hope I’m wrong about this.
I think that Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy understand the importance of this effort. And I suspect they understand what they’re up against. When Elon accepted the position in DOGE, he immediately hired a huge security team, for 24-hour armed protection. He understands what he’s up against.
Good luck, guys. I’m rooting for you.
But gosh, I don’t know…
Published in General
Public goods only.
Zero actual inflation which we aren’t even close to.
It’s a good idea to point a gun at everybody’s head and forced them into Medicare and Social Security if we run them right. We don’t.
Don’t import deflation from the Chinese mafia. Import deflation from anybody else.
Politicians never talk like that.
Both cutting spending and cutting taxes happen to be very important.
Working class people now fully understand that the Fed income taxes taken out of their paychecks don’t often help Americans. Instead our Fed largesse is about enabling destructive forces like the FDA, CDC, and NIH, all of which are most often simply pass though mechanisms by which Big Pharma gets to push out drugs that are rushed through clinical trials with the trials being meaningless.
Meanwhile worthwhile drugs are routinely banned due to being cheap, easily manufactured and available. These banned drugs are not the boon to Big Medicine because, as is the case with ivermectin, they do not result in the users of these real remedies becoming perpetually sick.
Then we also note that foreign aid has a lot more to do with promoting the proxy war in Ukraine and the on- going military might of Israel. Both endeavors help the MIC/Surveillance companies in this nation, plus also allow for money laundering that enriches Congress critters.
As far as taxes being cut: we need to re-examine the entire notion of the uber-wealthy people having charity foundations whenever they decide to set one up.
These entities shelter the wealth that the top richest people hold to such a spectacular degree that Bill Gates not only avoided paying a slew of taxes but he then used foundation monies to bribe “non-profit” enterprises like the 50 top media outlets in the USA as well as the Imperial College in the UK to do his bidding. His sheltered wealth allowed him to “adjust” the British domestic farm animals down to minimal levels during the 1990’s hoof and mouth “pandemic” that his underling Ferguson scared the Brit government into declaring. At that time, Ferguson was employed by Imperial College, a college that is funded by Gate’s foundation(s).
So since no one stopped Gates or Ferguson that time around, the same tactic was used in March 2020 to drive home the message that “COVID will kill 3.2% of all who are infected.” End result of that was the COVID era, which brought about 8.4 TRILLION dollars of Cares Acts in the USA, much of which was given only to the top 5% or so of all American companies and individuals.
This type of activity needs to be stopped.
Some think that starving the beast is a strategy to tame excessive government. It does not work, since politicians are not constrained by debt. I think the true beast is corruption in government, so my top priority is removing corruption. This would be removing self-enrichment (stock trading, Joe Manchin’s wife getting a billion dollar slush fund, paying family with campaign cash, revolving door with business,….). We need a law that pays Congress well, has term limits, and strict rules to prevent any self-enrichment. I am OK if that means only people that are financial successful will for Congress. I’d rather have a 100 dentists than 100 poor commie educrats. The next thing is a law that prevents self-enrichment of all government employees and contractors.
Depends on what you mean by “department.”
Crushing the POWER of the government is the need. That includes spending, but also regulation – everything connected with the power to destroy people and companies.
I have no problem with rich people spending their money as they see fit. This, too, is freedom. Freedom with money is a form of freedom of speech.
No, I don’t think it does.
The remaining problem is, who would enforce those government laws?
The government.
I’ve wondered if those reporters who continually use the phrase “slashing the budget” actually know what they are talking about. If spending on a particular line item was to grow by nine percent, but the government shows minimal restraint and allows the budget to grow by seven percent, some NPR SFB will bring out the same “slashing the budget” line, and probably find someone from East Ankle, Wisconsin to show the unacceptable damage that will be done to this deserving person. And that minimal restraint will fade away.
Just “now”?
Only “often“?!
In my humble opinion, working class people have always fully understood that paying Federal income taxes never helps an American. It always hurts the taxpayer.
But Dr. Bastiat is dead right: between these two political choices…
(a) tax more and borrow less, or tax less and borrow more?
and
(b) how much should government spend?
…horrible decisions on (b) are the big problem. Not (a), as you imply.
The problem is the spending.
Trump nominated for Labor Secretary somone who is in favor of strngthening public sector unions. Why would he do this if he really has any intention of cutting government (or letting Musk and Vivek do anything more than make proposals)?
If by department you mean cabinet level departments, I think it’s a pipe dream that will keep us from ever draining the swamp, because every department at that level has constituencies all across the political spectrum for this or that function. You really have to go look at what happened to such proposals in the past, and you’ll see that in the end you won’t even find a majority on Ricochet who will favor cutting them.
There are some who will talk of transferring those functions elsewhere, but if you’re going to do that, you are better off looking for particularly abusive sub-departments to delete 1) for which you can get the necessary political support from your own side, and maybe some of the other, and 2) which can’t be easily restored by the next Biden(TM) administration.
If you get enough of that done and are successful with it, it might become habit forming, and then you might have the political support to go after bigger game. I hope that’s what DOGE will do. (And I hope they remove the E from DOGE. We don’t want greater efficiency in evildoing.)
That’s why I think we should go after specific sub-departments and functions that are notorious for abuse. It gives a means to shut down all those weasel arguments about hurting the poor people from East Ankle. It makes it impossible for the entire cabinet department to hide its abusive operations behind the apron strings of the function that serves East Ankle, Wisconsin.
BTW, as we move forward on this, I hope East Ankle, Wisconsin becomes a household term.
Do you have any evidence that Trump intends to give her free reign? Controlling someone with a different agenda would be strength, not weakness.
Deregulation and, in general, reduction of government will be good for economy. There might even be a chance to outgrow the entitlement state debt if deregulation outpaces entitlement spending growth.
She’s in favor of ending right-to-work in all 50 states. Forget RFK or Gabbard, she’s BY FAR the worst of his cabinet picks.
That’s why the government is supposed to be split up into different parts that watchdog each other. That’s done in recognition that “electing better people” won’t cut it.
But can she do that on her own? No? Then why panic?
Unless/until they all end up on the same side.
Every time I talk about how to prevent that, using the same mechanisms the founders used, you disagree and say we need to just elect better people.
Personnel is policy.
Trump is looking a lot like an 80s Democrat.
I think it’s unlikely they will ever do that. I think what they will probably cut is benefits and services. And they will raise fees.
They really don’t care. The government employees’ goal is to protect their own salaries and benefits.
It’s going to be an interesting year watching MAGA sabotage MAGA every step of the way. Bumpy ride, indeed.
It wasn’t that long ago that MAGA was telling us that Trump needed to have all his nominees approved while the Senate stays home, and if the Senate does come to work anyway it better approve them all right quick or any Senators who vote no will get primaried.
Now we hear that it doesn’t matter who gets the cabinet positions, because these people just need to follow orders and be micromanaged, even if goes against everything they’ve done up to this point in life. If that were the case, why doesn’t Trump just ask all of Biden’s cabinet appointees to stay on? Why waste time on this nomination business?
I don’t know if you could maybe find any individuals who said BOTH THINGS, rather some have said the first and some have said the second. But overall, I think it’s a) more likely that Biden’s appointees were actually doing what he – or at least his handlers – wanted, and even if they didn’t he wasn’t likely to fire them, and b) more likely that if any of Trump’s nominees do get out of line, he won’t have a big problem deciding to replace them.
Some people deride that as “chaos” but any newly-organized team is going to need some shaking-out. That might happen with RFK too but I do understand why he was nominated to start with.
Arguably the “failure” there would not be that Trump might end up replacing some people, but that Biden DIDN’T.
For example, one function to delete would be the one whereby the IRS infamously denied 501(4)(c) status to Tea Party organizations. We could zero out that function or transfer it to another agency that wouldn’t have quite as much conflict of interest. I’m not sure why 501(4)(c) status needs to be approved, anyway. If the rules are clear, an organization could just declare itself to be 501(4)(c). Maybe there would be an extra reporting requirement every year at tax time to verify compliance with the rules. Congress could grant standing to other 501(4)(c) organizations, and maybe yet other organizations, who could sue if they have evidence that the requirements have been violated. Violations could be handled through the regular judicial system.
If we go through the list of daily outrages of the last 30 years, we’ll probably remind ourselves of other sub-departments that need to go away.
That seems like a good idea, but what if the IRS later decided that the organization was not “really” qualified? They’d just be doing their mischief at the back-end rather than the front-end.
She can certainly influence Trump. I don’t think Trump has a hard and fast rule about labor unions or right to work states. A little charming and praise of Trump can get him to change his policy on many issues.
That decision should not be theirs. The judicial system should handle it. Restore the constitutional separation of powers.
But he wouldn’t be hearing from ONLY HER.
The tax code needs adjustments. The uber rich, like Warren Buffet, members of the Soros clan who live in the USA, Elon Musk etc should not be able to have their wealth sheltered in these phoney baloney foundations.
There was a time when the uber wealthy like Carnegie had charities, and those actually contributed to our society. Libraries were built, across the nation and especially in places where the population had no access to big city libraries. Bath houses were built where people could swim and bathe for both health reasons and exercise.
Now we have little in the way of such necessary and enjoyable outlets because foundations are about creating political movements! Soros and his “Open Society” have been molding the minds of young people and funding commie candidates in their run for various political offices for decades. If there had been no ability for Bill Gates to create foundations to basically support The WHO, to donate monies to 50 separate media outlets including the BBC and NPR here in the US, and to have financial ties to CBS, the ability for The Elite to super impose The Covid era across all Western societies would have been impaired.
That impairment might have saved the nation 8.4 trillion dollars!
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