Remember when George was dumping pallets of shrink-wrapped dollar bills on Iraq and hiring twenty-something ideologues out of Bob Jones University to look after it?
rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/bill … se-bunker/
washingtonpost.com/blogs/fed … ghanistan/
Quick! Look over there! A black kid used a food stamp to buy a popsicle! Government spending is out of control!!
I’ve heard plenty of my Republican friends complaining about that sort of thing.
Yeah. I’ve got Republican friends. Get over it.
I’m sure you do.
Are these the same Republicans that were complaining that George W. Bush wasn’t a real conservative- in secret, behind locked doors, when nobody was around, because they sure weren’t doing it in public?
And, all props to your Repub buds, I was thinking of some more prominent types- you know, the kind that actually hold positions and appear on the TeeVee.
Speaking of bad public investments you won’t hear Republicans complaining about, the quagmeter is starting to spike again:
[quote=“MikeN”]I’m sure you do.
Are these the same Republicans that were complaining that George W. Bush wasn’t a real conservative- in secret, behind locked doors, when nobody was around, because they sure weren’t doing it in public?
And, all props to your Repub buds, I was thinking of some more prominent types- you know, the kind that actually hold positions and appear on the TeeVee.[/quote]
Those would be the Teabaggers.
OK, so instead of trying to solve the problem, they’re busier throwing blame around? Class act.
Fortunately, the Democrats have their own answer to evil military waste: Obamacare. But they won’t apologise for it, instead they applaud it.
forbes.com/sites/theapotheca … -arkansas/
[quote]GAO Bombshell: HHS Cooked The Books To Expand Obamacare In Arkansas
The Obama administration violated its own budget neutrality protocols, at a cost of $778 million to federal taxpayers.
GAO found that the spending limit approved by the Obama administration for Arkansas’s expansion relied on “hypothetical costs.” These costs came from Arkansas officials who argued that, absent the Private Option waiver, the state would have needed to raise Medicaid reimbursement rates in order to get enough doctors willing to participate in the expansion. So the Obama administration let Arkansas include the “hypothetical cost” of those rate hikes – which were entirely hypothetical – in its estimates, including an imaginary 67 percent increase in reimbursement rates for primary care services.
These hypothetical cost projections were reviewed by the Obama administration’s own actuaries before the waiver was approved; they “questioned the reasonableness of the state’s assumptions.” But the actuaries’ concerns were ignored and HHS approved the ObamaCare expansion without even requesting additional data to support it.[/quote]
I’m sure it’s all Republicans’ fault somehow, though! After all, everything always is, even ebola!
That trillion plus dollars and counting that Republicans flushed down the drain in Iraq probably would have paid for Obamacare with change left over.
And the waste from all of LBJ’s welfare programs would have paid for crushing Iraq several times over, plus the U.S. would have far fewer welfare cases to pay for today.
But at least he got them voting Democrat for the next several generations.
Can we all agree that the unchecked growth of big government is inherently wasteful, corrupt and a threat ot individual freedom, regardless of who’s running it?
Non-Democrats can agree, I’m sure. Democrats are all about the unchecked growth of big government, though.
Not sure if this is a tautology or merely a hoary old bromide.
I agree.
Okay. Anywhere that happening?
motherjones.com/files/blog_p … ctor_obama
news.yahoo.com/federal-deficit-p … 0AwenQtDMD
You did say unchecked. Unchecked growth of big government happened in North Korea, so you’ve got my support on that. Places like Norway and Sweden, not so much.
I think that we can all agree (haha) that the following would be a good way to reduce government spending, cut back on bureaucracy and provide greater efficiency and better use of funds in the field:
Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Welfare, Education, Labor, Agriculture, Energy should all be dismantled. Take this money, send it to the States in a block grant and let them decide how they want to spend it. Currently, there are too many program funds (bilingual education) that states bid on for grants that are irrelevant to their populations. Rather than everyone bidding on pots of money (why not?) that they may or may not need, have them prioritize all at the state level where there will be greater accountability and transparency. I fully realize that there will be outliers like Louisiana but then let those people suffer until they start to demand better governance. All nuclear to Department of Defense. Figure out how to get the Centers for Disease Control maintained under a federal agency or let it stand alone. As to food safety and work place safety, these also can be dealt with largely by the states OR put them like the CDC under some sort of federal agency.
Privatize the Postal Service. Sell off all those expensive downtown properties that currently are tax-free. This will generate additional revenues for inner cities. It will also level the playing field for delivery of junk mail and express mail. For those rural areas, guess what? They have two choices. Get online banking with direct deposit (it would be cheaper to send agents in the field to teach 80 year old gramps how to do this than to continue to maintain these mail services to three people along route 3) or pick up these checks at the grocery store or wherever they are going to get their food and/or gas. IF these people cannot get into town, it would be far cheaper to outsource someone to get paid to deliver to these few people rather than keep a whole postal service running just to deal with these limited cases.
Deregulate the power sector to enable better investment especially in transmission. Send power from East to West as the sun goes down. Incorporate Canada and Mexico to get better efficiencies. In some cases, 50 percent of power is being lost due to poor inefficient transmission and storage. Think of what that will do for CO2 emissions. Better than cutting checks for hundreds of millions of dollars for undeveloped countries in the Pacific and Africa to help them “mitigate” the effects of climate change. WTF?!
Reform the tax code. No more subsidies to agriculture, no more incentives to business, no more tax deductions for charitable giving, mortgage interest, business lunch expenses. Flatten it and make it simple. Lots of lawyers and accountants will lose their jobs but think of the efficiencies. For those who have issues with accumulated wealth, perhaps, then the focus should be on the inheritance side for truly large fortunes. Given current housing prices, I think that anything under $10 million should be pretty much left alone. That is not the kind of wealth that is going to cause inequalities of a dangerous nature.
[quote=“fred smith”]I think that we can all agree (haha) that the following would be a good way to reduce government spending, cut back on bureaucracy and provide greater efficiency and better use of funds in the field:
[/quote]
Amazingly, I agree with fred on most of this- some things may be due to my ignorance of that exotic foreign country
I agree with this on HUD, Education, and Agriculture. Education can be done at the State level, but spending should be equalised state-wide, rather than from local property taxes- you could go the school reform route and have spending attached to the child.
Energy has some national aspects, as does Labor, but as cabinet departments they could go-( Labor is so weak as to be generally useless on workers’ rights anyway.)
Health and Human Welfare- naw, I still think a national gov’t has responsibility for a minimum standard- and block grants to the states means basically conservative areas simply crapping on the poor, especially the darker-skinned ones. They do this in Canada, though the Feds maintain minimum standards- I remember when it turned out the Alberta social services were giving their junkies $50 and a Greyhound ticket to Vancouver.
Including civilian power plants?- that looks like a pretty big increase in government control.
Isn’t that the way it already is? CDC, and FEMA have to be national. And of course the EPA 
Aren’t they mostly that way already? Besides, they’ve basically been made victims of regulatory capture, with the sectors they’re supposed to control running the show- they need to be made more independent and given stronger powers.
yep- the postie’s pretty well obsolete.
Knew about the inefficient transmission, but is that due to regulation? Thought they’d already deregged that. Enron?
Again, yes. These not only lead to corruption, regulatory capture, and cronyism, but also lead to distortions in the economy. They divert huge amounts of human capital to gaming the tax system, and lead businesses to make investments for the tax benefit, rather than on economic grounds. Plus they give people a distorted idea of what’s going on- if a politician wants some particular benefit to society (goodies for his/her constituents), put the cost out in front of the public, let them decide, and take the money out of general taxation.