First, a relevant quote from Thomas Sowell,
“When I used to teach, I would ask the class to imagine a government agency with only two tasks:
1) Build statues of Benedict Arnold.
2) Provide medications to children.
If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do? Of course, cut the children’s medications because that is far more likely to prompt the public to get the budgets restored. If they cut back on Benedict Arnold statues, people might actually ask why they were building them in the first place.”
Example #1:
This week, the Michigan governor was told he had zero chance of increasing the gasoline tax by 17 cents to pay for road repairs and construction. He then asked the Michigan legislature to come up with a solution and they did: “Strip away all the money collected from the current gas tax that goes to education and use it on roads, then we will have a voter referendum in the fall to raise the state sales tax by 1% and we’ll say it is for education so people will vote for it.”
Example 2:
To create public alarm over the sequester budget cuts…
- The Dept. of Homeland Security prematurely released +300 convicted illegal aliens from prison
- The FAA claimed it would cut back controllers and increase flight delays
- White House tours were cancelled (saving $74,000) but million-dollar monthly vacations by the first family and vice-presidential family will continue; along with oil paint-portraits of White House administrators totaling hundreds of thousands.
In order to allow the president to make careful budget cuts where he wanted, the house of representatives offered a bill to give him that flexibility. But the president said he would veto that bill because then he would be to blame for cuts.
Sequester Perspective:
The sequester cuts are only a tiny reduction in the growth in government spending, a total of $44 billion this year. To put this in perspective, the ratings agency, Fitch said that the U.S. would have to cut $1.6 trillion to avoid further credit downgrades and another $3 trillion if the U.S. were going to start reducing the debt. Basically, the sequester is less than 1% of what is necessary to get on stable footing. If you include the $123 trillion in unfunded U.S. liabilities, the sequester is only 0.04% of a cut.
To equate this to a family’s finances, if your income were $80,000 and you had an unsustainable amount of $350,000 in credit card debt, the sequester that politicians are crying about would be like letting your credit card balances increase further in 10 years to only $405,000 instead of only $410,000. Only a politician could call that a “cut” in spending and be baffled over why their credit rating is falling!