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Bad News for Team Perry
Who wouldn’t want to see this guy sitting across from the Iranians?
Former Texas Governor Rick Perry has perhaps the best résumé in the presidential field. His state created 1.5 million jobs in the past eight years, he balanced his state’s budget every year, and he lowered taxes 75 times. He’s a veteran, tough on the border, and so pro-second amendment he shoots coyotes on his morning jog. Despite his bad experience with debating on back pain meds in 2012, his compelling history should make him a shoo-in for the top tier of the 2016 race.
But in a 17-person field where media oxygen is dominated by a reality-show blowhard and big donations are hoovered up by a presidential scion, it’s tough for even an alpha candidate like Perry to make headway. Poor polling forced him to last week’s kiddie-table debate which had only a third of the viewers as the main event later that night. Despite Perry’s strong performance, Carly Fiorina turned in an even better performance which attracted most of the post-broadcast attention.
After his campaign raised just over $1 million in the second quarter, times are getting tight around Perry HQ:
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign team in South Carolina is no longer being paid by his presidential campaign, National Journal has learned.
“Pay is only one reason people do this,” Katon Dawson, Perry’s South Carolina state director said in an interview. “We’ll be able to live off the land for a while.”
It is not clear if or when paychecks will start backing up for Perry’s team in South Carolina. Dawson said that Perry staffers in the state “have been paid up to two weeks ago.”
Dawson said core members of Team Perry, including himself, will continue to work, even if unpaid. He said Walter Whetsell and Le Frye, two top Perry operatives in the state, are among those still working.
“We’ll do it whether there’s pay or no pay,” Dawson said. In addition to the pay freeze, at least one Perry staffer was let go last week. Dawson said that move was unrelated to any “financial discomfort.”
On the plus side, Perry’s super PAC has raised about $17 million; certainly not Jeb! numbers, but impressive given the sprawling GOP field. Unless they can use that money to boost Perry’s profile fast, the swaggering Texan might be running out of time.
Published in General
I think you mean Cat, not me. (You had me stumped, I couldn’t figure out what you thought I’d said.)
Oooh, quite correct. Musta gotten in the habit of responding to you :-)
Haven’t had time to dig into this argument, but I don’t think you’ll find me arguing for cutting defense.
I mean, why would you, right? (admits to slight troll)
Leigh, you mention a lot of considerations. You’re aware of many factors. You know that California no longer is a majority white state and is now overwhelmingly Democratic.
But after all these years of cultural and social decline and the establishment of mass left-wing political party in your beloved country, you just can’t bring yourself to say the 5 little words:
“Today, America needs fewer immigrants.”
No projection – I’ll take your clear inference: you won’t say them because you don’t want to be called a racist.
That’s a nice ideological glass jaw you have. Waterford or Orrefors?
No wonder so many Republicans are good at defending, but are lousy at punching. No wonder Sam Francis called one of his collections of essays about Republicans “Beautiful Losers.”
I’m sure that this was intended to be read in a gently humorous tone with no ill feeling, but this seemed like a good time to remind everyone about the civility and charm we enjoy so much on Ricochet.
No need for personal attacks and character assassination. Please play the ball and not the person. Thank you very much.
Freesmith, I’m going to have to drop out. I have a life. But two simple points:
First, I said I don’t know how many immigrants we should take in, and I meant exactly what I said. Determining numbers takes research, and I have not done that research.
Second, the most far-left place I’ve ever been — utterly socialist, with less conservative influence than California or New York — high crime, high poverty, society in complete breakdown — is completely white.
Vermont? Portland has a little ethnic diversity.
Scotland.
EDIT: Pre-empting inevitable correction: I know there is some ethnic diversity in the cities. I have a region in mind.
How many immigrants America needs? Zero.
We are more than capable of producing humans domestically. Everything else is nice-to-haves and beg-the-question arguments against solving problems here at home.
This is not to say that no immigration is valid. but like a zero-based budget, why can we not start from this obvious fact? America is full of Americans and if markets are allowed to work, people will respond to incentives. Government policy warps markets and men alike so that artificial gaps are created which are then filled with artificial Americans. Cheaper than the real thing under the current disastrous and self-destructive circumstances.
But not necessary if evaluated as part of the current reality, rather than a series of Student Union coffee talks.
Pah! I didn’t realize you meant abroad. In Scotland’s defense, by foreigner standards they’re quite conservative. I’m not a fan of Scottish government, the excellent staff in local government museums aside, but it’s much better than, say, Bolivia’s or Sudan’s.
Not sure what you’re getting at here. Are you trying to get me to embrace anarchism or complacency? That’s a genuine question. You seem to be implying that it’s impossible to discern spending that’s wasteful from that which is necessary so any attempt to reform the DoD budget is futile.
What conclusion do we draw from that? Because defense is a proper function of government, we should accept the the DoD budget in it’s entirety, or that reform is impossible therefore we ought to axe the thing altogether?
I don’t expect the DoD to ever be streamlined into a pork-free paragon of thriftiness, anymore than I’d expect the best run corporations to be 100% efficient. Hardly means improvement is unattainable.
Thanks for the link. I’ll take a closer look later on. However, I’m skeptical of the government’s data. Sources that go into greater detail beyond some charts would be appreciated.
http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/fy16budget.pdf
If this is also too short, I’ll get you more.
In what way am I “gunning” for defense. I’ve been clear that Social Security and Medicare are the two major obstacles to a balanced budget. According to CBO data James of England linked to earlier, non-defense discretionary spending is about equal to the defense budget and is ripe for major cuts.
For all the hand-wringing about America’s defense budget outclassing the next nine countries, our military spending isn’t that massive as a proportion of GDP. Defense is a necessary and legitimate duty of the federal government. Yet, I balk at those who regard the defense budget as sacred. Even small cuts are treated as verboten.
Which brings us back to my point. You admit there’s waste in the DoD, but dismiss attempts to cut it on the flimsy grounds that there’s waste elsewhere in the government (something no one here disputes). Can’t we make cuts everywhere?
You just agreed that Defense had already undergone cuts larger per dollar than other areas. yet you claim to want across thr board something. SO the math doesn’t add up. Unless you agree that “mandatory” spending should remain off-limits. In which case we will never balance anything much less reduce the debt, so why bother? The only constant in this is you want to cut defense.
I am willing to cut defense, but only as part of a program that might actually accomplish something besides unilateral disarmament. it is right and good that the government spends *some* money on defense, and on many other things, not so much. So where’s the equivalence?
I tend to view every conversation about cutting defense as a Ron Paul / neo-Randian stalking horse for disarmament and letting the free market privateers take care of everything — until proven otherwise. Not saying that’s you, but I’ve been online for a while, and that’s a safe bet most of the time.
Some parts of Scotland have been kept remotely sane by the rest of Scotland, and more importantly by England. (And Margaret Thatcher, whom they will never forgive for it.)
I haven’t studied the SNP’s domestic platform in detail — but what I’m told by people on the ground is that they’re far left by European standards. (Of course, Labour might be about to uproot some assumptions.)
Just pointing out that pasty-white Anglo-Saxon protestants with a strong tradition of democratic governance are actually capable of voting just as far left as some groups of American immigrants.
It’s true that improvement is possible. After decades of working incredibly hard to cut spending and get things done, though, the questions aren’t easy. Veronique de Rugy complains about the continued existence of A10s because those are the closest thing to easy targets.
This means that there aren’t good dramatic changes that are likely to be possible for you and I to evaluate; the numbers and impacts are simply too complicated.
Your interactions with Paulbots have clouded your judgment. Personally, I respect a lot about Rand Paul and his father, but am repulsed by their (and their associates/followers) foreign policy views which are more radically anti-American than the average Democrat or even mainstream liberals. There are those who cloak disarmament as an issue of fiscal responsibility. I’m not one of them.
“Across the board” are your words, not mine. I’m not saying mandatory entitlements are off-limits (in fact I’ve said the opposite multiple times), but that defense shouldn’t be either.
I’m failing to see where the disagreement is. We’re both willing to make some cuts to defense, but know that that is insufficient to balance the budget (even if the cuts were massive). I don’t think defense should receive the majority of cuts, but that we should focus on cutting more programs rather than protecting defense from any trimming.
That’s where the wonks come in. It isn’t possible for the average person (or even the well-informed) to know all the intricacies of the budget of any government agency, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who can pinpoint wasteful spending.
Waste, fraud and abuse have been the unicorn answer for as long as I can remember. You could eliminate one type of waste, only to find that new waste replaces it. The incentive structure that drives government waste will remain unchanged no matter what reforms you make, as long as the appointed task remains in the hands of government.
If you want less waste and fraud in a program, you must reduce the overall size of the program, including it’s valid purposes. There is no free lunch answer to finding savings in the budget.
Right. I agree. Those wonks are already present, though. Of course we should favor vigorous prosecution of W, F & A, but we shouldn’t pretend that this would be a change from current procedure.
Viewed from a distance, they’re hardcore leftists, sharing a European party with various hard left leaning Greens and left libertarians (the Pirate Party). Their record is more moderate, though. They had the ability to raise income taxes in Scotland, for instance, and chose not to. They favor abolishing the Air Passenger Duty (a tax of up to ~$600 per round trip air ticket). Wiki characterizes them as Social Democrats, which I think is fair. They’re probably to the right of the French government, to the left of the German SDP, and they’re certainly to the right of the Communists and such who form the left in other parts of the EU.
Eliminating waste, fraud and abuse is an easy way for unserious politicians to appear like they’re hawkish on the budget without upsetting the status quo (and not getting into danger of balancing the budget). I’ll reiterate that I don’t expect any government agency to become perfectly efficient (ditto any private institution) and I believe the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. How is wanting to improve the DoD’s expenses the same as a free lunch? Demanding accountability for how our tax dollars are spent is not comparable to asking for handouts.
Of course you should demand accountability for how tax dollars are spent, but you should know that American politicians have been responding to those demands since before they sought independence. Washington complains vigorously about those demands, as have countless generals and Presidents since.
What you’re talking about isn’t “we should have a system for accounting for these things”. We have a system. In fact, we have a number of systems. I’ll link to sample reports from each of a selection of them. We have the DoD Comptroller. We have the CBO’s many reports. We have the Senate Armed Services Committee. We have the House Armed Services Committee. Each force has its own Comptroller organization, and there are organizations to monitor the monitors in each service.
We spend billions of dollars on avoiding waste, fraud, and abuse. In the Army alone, budget cuts come through the AAA auditors, through Army Headquarters Transformation, through Better Buying Power, through Business Process Reengineering, through Army Benefits Reporting and Tracking’s Cost Benefit Analysis, through Directed Reductions, through something to do with focus areas (not sure about that), through Mil to Civ programs, through IACT (dunno about that either), through Newt’s Lean Six Sigma, through Reductions in Force, through process automation, through service contract reductions, and through insourcing programs.
What you’re talking about when you demand that it’s cut further is that we develop yet more bureaucracy, or we demand that our existing institutions work through yet more programs. Or maybe you think we can ditch Lean Six Sigma and replace it with something better. If you think that we can replace LSS for the same cost with something that offers upsides but no serious downsides, you’re in free lunch territory. If you think that adding another institution or program will more than pay for itself without stripping capability, you’re in free lunch territory.
Demanding that defense is accountable is like demanding that the rate of improvement in iPhones be increased. No one is going to disagree with the claim that Apple can do better, but if someone whose job is not directing iPhone R&D tells you an understandable story about how Apple could institute greatly superior processes, they’re selling you a line. Of course customers should demand that Apple strives to do its best, but we can rely on that happening. If you or I become highly informed about, say, the mechanics of accelerometers, maybe we could usefully lobby people in Apple to notice a particular improvement they might make. If we’ve just read a book or two on the subject, though, we’re unlikely to do anything more useful than take up the time of whichever employees we talk to about the issue.
Pete Hesgeth may be able to bring about some useful VA reforms, and we can support him. If we win the next election, you can bet we’ll have a great Assistant Secretary of the Army for Financial Management and Comptroller. At that point, it’d be helpful to email the ASA(FMC) and see what you, as a blogger, can do to help overcome bureaucratic resistance and demand the reduction of W,F&A. Or you could probably find an address for someone more junior, like Col. Brimberry, Commander of the United States Army Financial Management Command (not one of the units I mentioned above), and see what he wants to get done under the new CinC. Heck, maybe he’d appreciate some help right now.
Generalized demands that things simply improve without cost, though, are free lunch demands.
Anybody who thinks dumping the A-10 is low-hanging fruit is wasting time if ignored, or wasting Americans if heeded.
The cheap, effective, immediate (in battle terms) A-10 remains the deal of the century. Especially if you have skin in the game. Note the absence of quote marks.
Sorry, to be clear, I was saying that there’s a lot of charlatans in this field. It should go without saying that CATO and Reason are particularly virulent in their hucksterism. The A10 was the best example Rugy could find (it’s a plane even the Air Force don’t want! Clearly this is a simple issue!)
In general, I’m not of the view that a responsible think tank would employ people who don’t understand the role of the Warthog to analyse defense budgets.
I mean, maybe as an intern (like you knew better when you were 18…. well, okay, you probably did, but there were lots of important things you didn’t know then), but not as the front page talent.