Nancy Pelosi and Morality? Really!

Just when you think it might be a tough day to find a topic to discuss, Nancy Pelosi rides to the rescue again. Ms. Pelosi has been a treasure of insanity, quotes, and madness over time and has provided fodder for many a post to this blog. Remember how she screamed that over 500 million Americans were losing their jobs every week even though there are barely 300 million people in the country? Remember how she explained we would not know what was in the health care reform legislation until the legislation got passed? Remember her voodoo economic lesson she gave us by proclaiming that unemployment benefit checks were one of the very best ways to create jobs, leaving one to ponder the extension of her logic: does this mean that the more unemployed people we have, the more jobs will be created? Priceless.

Today she has graced us with another Pelosiism that further illustrates how out of touch with reality she can be. Regarding the urgent need to get Federal government under control, Ms. Pelosi recently dropped this gem on the world: "I think this debate is on a higher ground of our values. It's not about money. It's about the morality of what we're doing." Thus, it appears that we should not make any cuts in the bloated federal government on morality grounds, not sensible budgeting and economic grounds. Ridiculous.

Any number of things wrong with Pelosi talking about morality. First of all, morality is a very personal, private sense of being. For her to dictate what is moral and what is not moral is an insult to free thought and overall freedom. If she wants to go down that road, then many Americans would reply that any political party that condones adultery and lying has no grounds to lecture any citizen about morality. Democrats John Edwards, Jim MacGreevey, Eliot Spitzer, and Bill Clinton were serious adulterers and liars.

Is breaking the law immoral? Many, many Democratic politicians in Illinois have served prison time for bribery, fraud, and other crimes. Democratic Congressman William J. Jefferson was convicted of bribery with the added twist of storing his bribery money in his freezer. Please, Ms. Pelosi, your peers and your party are in no position to lecture any American about morality.

Second, how moral would the decision to cut wasteful government spending in the following areas:

• Is it "moral" to waste billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to station tens of thousands of U.S. troops around the world in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and throughout Europe, defending us against threats that no longer exist or that can be better handled by local, friendly countries?
• Is it "moral" to waste billions and billions of taxpayer dollars on politicians' earmarks that are nothing more than thinly disguised ways for incumbent politicians to fund their re-election campaigns?
• Is it "moral" to waste billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to support the marketing activities of large corporations via the government's Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the Market Access Program, and other corporate welfare programs, shouldn't these marketing expenses be part of each corporation's marketing expense stream?
• Is it "moral" to not sell at least some of the 55,000 Federal government buildings that are currently vacant in order to reduce reduce taxpayer expenses and generate revenue via the sales of these buildings to reduce the deficit?
• Is it "moral" to not cancel the production of the V-22 Osprey aircraft and save billions of taxpayer dollars, an aircraft that has seen vast cost overruns and poor performance results and which much of the military does not want or need?
• Is it "moral" to not replace the highly expensive but poorly performing Space Tracking Surveillance System with lower cost and better performing alternatives (according to a Defense Department analysis, the users of the systems)?
• Is it "moral" to waste billions of taxpayer dollars by allowing the Army, Navy, and Air Force to continue ordering obsolete parts and supplies that are never used?

(Note: many of these wasteful examples of government spending come from a joint analysis and paper done by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the National Taxpayers Union. However, other reputable and educated American organizations such as the Cato Institute, the Concord Coalition, and Obama's own deficit reduction commission have also done thoughtful, thorough, and insightful analysis on ways to get government spending under control that are also "moral.")

You get the idea. By not knowing how to trim and budget of fat and excess or not wanting to trim the budget, Ms. Pelosi just lumps every government expense into this nebulous "moral" bucket that should not be touched because she and only she knows what is moral and what is not. A budget by definition is numbers. You can debate the impact reducing some of those numbers might have but a budget is numbers. Unfortunately, the Federal government's numbers are not good and need to be drastically reduced.

If Ms. Pelosi wants to talk morality, let me counter argue that the biggest atrocity to morality would be if this generation of America citizens and American politicians burden future generations of Americans with mountains of debt to pay off but who garnered none of the benefits of spending the money that caused the debt. That is the biggest moral tragedy of our time if we fail, not whether or not Pelosi thinks not cutting the bloated government is the moral thing to do.

It amazes me that she and others can continue to think that we are not in crisis/meltdown mode when the Federal deficit in February alone was over $200 billion. Not total spending, just the spending of the government that was done beyond what revenues were received. If we use $200 billion as a conservative estimate of the February deficit, then everyday Pelosi and her kind spent over $7 billion a day that they did not have cash for. Every hour they spent almost $300 million that they did not have.

Unbelievable numbers. This kind of reckless spending is immoral. It will wreck our economy and our freedom for decades to come. But we should not be surprised. The latest Obama budget has virtually no budget cuts despite the dismal February results. Obama totally ignored his own deficit reduction commission's recommendations.

And not to be outdone, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently and erroneously stated that Social Security will be solvent for decades to come, a most insane statement that Ms. Pelosi cannot even match for unbridled ignorance. Currently, the Social Security Administration is paying tens of billions of dollars more than it collects. The Social Security Trust fund has been depleted by politicians over time for other uses, there is no trust fund of money sitting around the U.S. Treasury. The unfunded liabilities of Social Security is well into the TRILLIONS of dollars. And Harry thinks it is solvent for decades. That is the most immoral, misleading statement that any politician can make.

Thus, we have the triumvirate of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid who either see no problem, cannot solve the problem, or choose not to solve the problem. In any case, they do not have the high moral ground and future generations of Americans will see them for what they are: morally corrupt and inept.



Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at http://www.loathemygovernment.com/. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.


Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment

Budget Cutting For Dummies ...And Washington Politicians, Part 4 - Where's President Obama?

The last three days we have examined some innovative and critically researched ideas that would reduce the Federal government's outrageous deficit spending by hundreds of billions of dollars every year without significant economic or financial hardship and pain to ordinary Americans. These ideas ranged across the entire spectrum of government functions and included the elimination of wasteful, redundant, or obsolete government programs and departments. As we stated on Monday, the country is on a spending a debt trajectory that will eventually collapse both the economy and the country.

Today's post takes a slightly different tack on the whole national debt issue. But before explaining the back end of the title of today's post, "Where's President Obama?" consider the following quotes:

“Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration or the next generation.” President Barack Obama


"We were told by our President that we could fight two wars, increase our military budget by 74%, spend more on education, initiate a prescription drug plan, have tax cuts, all at the same time. We were told by Congress that they could make up for lost revenue by cutting government waste. The result is the most precarious budget situation we have seen in years. We now have an annual budget deficit of almost $300 billion, not counting more than $180 billion we borrow every year from the Social Security Trust Fund." President Barack Obama

"Obama must take the lead in cutting lethal U.S. debt." Syndicated columnist Morton Kondracke, February 15, 2011 article.

"How are we going to rein in government spending? We have heard very little from the President. Now maybe he will open up with his budget... But he really has to lead here, and so far he simply has not." Glen Hubbard, Dean, Columbia School Of Business, Business Week quote, February 14, 2011 issue.

"Obama Must Lead On Deficit Cuts." Financial Times headline, February 13, 2011

"Tomorrow never comes." David Brooks, New York Times, February 17, 2011 article quote when explaining how the Obama administration keeps delaying the task of cutting spending.

"One and Done: To Be a Great President, Obama Should Not Seek Re-election in 2012."  Douglas Schoen and Patrick Caddell, Washington Post article from November 14, 2011, explaining that if the President declared he would not seek re-election and focused only on taming the deficit, he would save the nation and go down as a great President.

Seems like the entire country is waiting for the President to step up and tackle the hard question of getting the national debt and government spending under control. A task of such a large and wide ranging reach needs strong leadership to get the hard work, debate, and actions accomplished in a manner that completes the task in the most efficient and caring way possible.

Unfortunately, that is not the approach the President has taken. He has criticized previous Bush administration deficits as being too large but which are a fraction of the deficits that have occurred during his Presidency. He has said that he will eventually get around to deficit reduction but first other issues had to be tackled. Once tackled, however, he still does not take up the lead. He appointed a bipartisan commission that took the better part of a year researching, analyzing, and proposing a comprehensive set of deficit reduction ideas, all of which were rejected without the slightest show of interest in what the commission had come up with. The 2011 deficit will skyrocket to well over  TRILLION dollars but both his state of the union message and latest budget proposal show no significant effort to reduce spending. He is nowhere to be found despite the calls from all sides to get out and lead.

Why is he is "leading from the rear" as one columnist, David Brooks once surmised? Great leaders in all walks of life, good and bad, lead from the front. FDR was always out front leading the country through the dark times of the Depression. Churchill was always out front leading the British people during the darkest times of the war. Martin Luther King, Jr. was leading the marches through the streets of the South during the civil rights era. Steve Jobs has led Apple back from the brink of extinction by being out front, on the cutting edge, taking chances. General Custer never brought up the rear in the 7th Calvary. When the historic chance of a lifetime, saving the United States from its government spending presents itself, as outlined in the Washington Post article above, the President is nowhere to be seen.

Why is that? I suppose you could surmise a few possibilities:

1. Reason 1: The President does not understand the depth of the problem. I would find this reason difficult to believe. The man is a Harvard graduate. He proposed the Deficit Reduction Commission. I am sure his press people are keeping him abreast of articles like the ones listed above. It is not a secret what is going on. From the quotes above, he is saying all the right words. Is it possible that the President simply does not get it?
2. Reason 2: The President does not want to understand the depth of the problem. This might be a little more believable. I would bet that he did not come into office to become a budget cutter and an accountant. I am sure he had lofty goals that included instituting massive social and government programs that would be a lasting monument to his government work. And now this pesky $14 TRILLION national debt issue is getting in the way of his high speed rail lines, electric cars, his cap and trade or equivalent programs, etc. In other words, he is in denial. And these pet projects are more important, in his mind, than saving the country from its own spending habits.
3. Reason 3: The President views his re-election as the only priority and does not want to alienate a single voter by cutting government spending. As with almost every current American politician, getting elected is both the means and the ends, regardless of what damage it does to the American people, our economy, and our freedom. It used to be you got elected (the means) to do great government work for the good of the country (the ends.) Today in America, the winning of the election is all that matters. I think this is the driving force for leading from the rear, do not shake the boat, it might endanger my re-election. This is also very dangerous because if this is indeed the President's reason for not leading form the front, the chances of getting sane, logical, effective, and significant spending reductions are less likely. This would put the country at least two more years further down the deficit rathole, making recovery all the more difficult. And who knows, even Obama got re-elected, he could continue to believe that "tomorrow never comes."
4. Reason 4: The last possible reason, and the scariest, is that he wants the economy to collapse, allowing him to sweep in and socialize and nationalize every facet of our lives once he has wiped out the existing institutions of government, a functioning free market economy, and freedom. Let's us hope that this is not his end game and the reason he appears apathetic to the whole economy crashing scenario.

If I was a betting person, I would bet that the trifecta/win-place-show order is: Reason 3 (to win) followed by Reason 2 (to place), Reason 1 (to show) and Reason 4 bringing up the rear. I believe that the President is just another contemporary politician who considers running for office the only endeavor worth doing and doing well (i.e. winning). Everything else is secondary, especially when it interferes with his own grand plans, as listed in Reason 2.

Unfortunately, with the exception of the long shot reason 4, while betting the trifecta might be amusing, regardless of the winning reason, the results are the same, he is not addressing the problem. And the reins of leadership may not be his much longer if you consider some of the information from the Morton Kondracke article:

• Republican Senator Tom Coburn and Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, both current members of the Senate and former members of the President's Deficit Reduction Commission, are jointly working on plans to implement some of the proposals the commission came up with.
• Republican Senator Bob Corker and Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill are working on a proposal and legislation that would force the Federal government to reduce its spending over ten years so that  spending as a percentage of the nation's GDP would drop from the historical high levels today of about 24.6% to the long term historical average of 20.6%.
• Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss and Democratic Senator Mark Warner are also jointly working together to find a way to cut spending.
• Republican Congressman Paul Ryan has the only comprehensive, detailed plan out in public that would reform spending in all facets of government spending over a long term span.

Additionally, organizations such as the Concord Coalition, which is headed up by a former Republican Senator and Democratic Senator,  are providing necessary ideas by forging their own sensible plans for curtailing the deficit.

When a leader leaves a void in the front, as Obama has done here, that void will be filled by others with more courage than that leader in the rear. (Note: the fact that Senator Conrad will not be running for re-election in 2012 might be a source of courage for him). I cannot imagine FDR, Churchill, King, Jobs, etc. deciding that they would lay back and see what happens in order to not endanger their personal goals. Would not happen.

That is why Mr. Schoen and Mr. Caddell of the Washington Post were implying in their article:

"This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones."

Leading from the rear is never a good thing, especially considering the view. General Custer can tell testify to that. In fact, any dummy can see that.



Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at http://www.loathemygovernment.com/. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment
 
 

Why Does Everyone Recognize The Impending Financial Disaster Except the Political Class in Washington?

Before we try to understand why the Washington political class is so clueless about the gathering budget and debt storm clouds that are fast approaching, I thought it might be a good idea to review the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) relative to the country's financial shape, estimates that are very scary:

• Within a few months, our national debt will have escalated to $14 TRILLION or the equivalent of $121,739 per United States household.
• At an average household income of about $60,000 a year (pre-tax), each American household would have to go without food, shelter, clothes, or anything else for over two years to pay off their portion of the national debt as it stands now.
• If the government and the political class that runs it do not change their spending habits immediately, another $7 TRILLION will be added to the nation's debt over the next ten years. At that time, $21 TRILLION in debt will come out to about $136,000 a year per household if you assume the number of households grows at a rather robust 3% a year.
• However, to hit that $7 TRILLION number, the political class would have to allow all of the newly renewed tax cuts to expire in two years, they would not make any further adjustments to the Alternative Minimum Tax snafu and they would have to actually implement the draconian Medicare cuts they are supposed to do. These three steps are probably unlikely, given the spineless nature of our politicians, which means that it is not an additional $7 TRILLION but a more realistic $13.6 TRILLION. This would put the overall debt at almost $28 TRILLION and the equivalent household responsibility at $179,000.
• The CBO report goes on to estimate that interest on that debt over the next ten years would be around $5.4 TRILLION. Since the Obama administration has proposed cutting spending by only $478 billion over ten years and the Republicans have targeted $2.5 TRILLION in budget cuts, neither party's half hearted efforts at fiscal restraint will come close to just paying off the interest on our debt. In this reality, the United States will never pay off its ever increasing debt load. This is like someone's personal finances who constantly spend 70% more than what they earn and who only pays off a fraction of that 70% amount every month. The simple math will eventually crush them.
• By the year 2021, the CBO estimates that the country would be paying more than a TRILLION a year just in interest payments on the debt. For comparison purposes, understand that today the Federal government collects only a little more than $2 TRILLION a year in revenue. Thus, by 2021, about half of what we would pay in taxes today would be solely for interest payments.
• In 2011, given the newly estimated and higher 2011 deficit, the annual deficit will be equal to about 9.8% of the country's GDP, about a percentage point higher than it was in 2010 and almost as bad as the 10% incurred in 2009. That 10% was the highest deficit to GDP ratio in 65 years. The general consensus is that a country's deficit number should be no more than 3% of its GDP and in 2011 the United States will exceed that threshold maximum by three fold.
• According to the CBO report, mandatory government spending (which I am assuming is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) will rise an average of 5.6% a year for the next ten years. Since the U.S. economy rarely grows more than 3-4% a year, in good times, unless changes are made to the mandatory spending levels, more and more taxes will have to be collected to make up the shortfall. More and more taxes going to the government means less and less spending on growing the economy which reduces the tax stream which requires higher taxes, etc., etc. Its called a death spiral.
• Although not in the CBO report, recall our analysis last summer of a Fortune magazine article. That article estimated the total wealth, not income, of the four hundred richest Americans. If you add up that wealth you see that these 400 Americans control about $2.7 TRILLION of wealth. Theoretically, if the government was to confiscate everything these Americans owned, sold it and applied what they received to the almost $28 TRILLION national debt we will have in about ten years, the rest of America would still owe our debtors about $25 TRILLION. The lesson: you cannot solve this impending disaster by taxing the rich more since even if you took everything they owned, it would reduce the national debt by less than 10%.

A lot of numbers but the message is so clear: we are about to do a Thelma and Louise off of the financial cliff and the Democrats are steering the car and the Republicans are not working the breaks. But this does not have to be the case. Consider what some other, smarter Americans are doing relative to the ballooning national debt:

1. The CATO Institute is going through the last Federal budget, line by line, program by program, and identifying ways to cut and save taxpayer money. I will go into their findings in detail in the near future but they are easily finding hundreds of billions of dollars in either wasteful, useless, or redundant government operations that need to be terminated immediately.
2. The President instituted his own Deficit Reduction Commission to look into ways to curb Federal spending and get the debt under control. As predicted, he gave it no support from start to finish and despite the excellent bipartisan recommendations they came up with, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid effectively neutered any action before it even got started. I feel sorry for those that worked and succeeded in implementing the charter of the commission, the political class never wanted them to succeed in the first place.
3. Nicole Tichon of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, (liberal leaning) and Andrew Moylan of the National Taxpayers Union (conservative leaning) developed and reported on a joint analysis of government spending entitled, "Toward Common Ground: Bridging The Political Divide To Reduce Spending." They also easily found hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could be cut out of the Federal budget with minimal impact on most Americans, projects that they list (much like the CATO analysis) in their report. Many of these savings are not just straight budget cuts but straight forward, logical cost efficiencies that our political class should have been pursuing for decades. If you look at their list of cuts, the average American would have not problems with their recommendations since they are unaffected by the wasteful spending.
4. The Bipartisan Policy Center, which is headed by former Democratic and Republican majority leaders, has been meeting on a regular basis in Washington to also come up with an approach to saving the country from its debt. The members on the panel addressing the issue within the Center include both Republicans and Democrats, most have extensive government budgeting experience, and they are addressing EVERY government expenditure including Social Security and Medicare.
5. The Concord Coalition is headed up by an ex-Republican Senator, Warren Rudman, and an ex-Democratic Senator, Bob Kerry, and they and their coalition have also done extensive work in examining ways to reducing our out of control spending.
6. In an AP/NBC poll that was reviewed in The Week magazine issue from December 10, 2010, the results showed that Americans favored government spending cuts over tax increases by a two to one margin.
7. At www.loathemygovernment.com, the website associated with this blog and the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," site visitors can vote on several dozen recent government spending programs to show whether they support any of those expenditures. About half of the projects listed have been rejected by 100% of those who voted and the rest of them have been rejected by over 90% of the voters.

So let's review. The country is heading for insolvency by just about any way you measure reality. Republicans and Democrats, progressive think tanks and conservative think tanks, sometimes working together, have come up with drastic, viable and necessary approaches to avoiding sovereign insolvency. Ordinary Americans have voted do cut unnecessary government expenses via the AP poll, via the list of projects and programs at our book's website, and in the November elections when dozens of Tea Party endorsed candidates were elected to curb spending.

It appears that the only people in the country that have not gotten the message are the long term, established political careerists in Washington. Their cuts, regardless of who is recommending them are minuscule compared to the overall budget. They sabotage their own deficit reduction commissions. The take the Bush tax cut debate issue, which revolved around whether or not to receive an additional $70 billion a year in taxes from the richest Americans and they manage to turn that into a one year additional deficit of over $400 billion, according to the CBO. Unbelievable.

If everyone else in the country sees the problem, why don't our politicians? Probably because they are afraid to take an unpopular stand since it might cost them some votes in their re-election campaign even though their lack of courage is killing the financial viability of the nation. Very, very selfish and short term thinking.

The only other possible reason for their inaction and sabotage of reduction efforts is that they truly do not understand the basics of government finances. In either case, selfishness or ignorance, we are in for a Thelma and Louise ending unless changes are made.

"Love my Country, Loathe My Government" would provide some insights on how they should proceed for the good of the country:

1. Step 1 would reduce government spending by 10% a year for five years and could easily use the spending reduction road maps that many of the above efforts have come up with.
2. Step 5 would increase law enforcement efforts to crack down and eliminate fraud and criminal activity that robs the government of untold billions of dollars every year.
3. Step 30 would bring back almost all of the deployed U.S. troops around the world who are stationed to fight potential conflicts that no longer exist (e.g. why does the U.S. still have over 50,000 troops stationed in Germany?). We no longer can afford to garrison the world with our troops.
4. Step 34 would hold Congressional committee members accountable for their areas of responsibility and remove them from those Committee post for dereliction of duty. If this rule was in effect, committees with Medicare oversight responsibilities would be re-staffed, given that Medicare loses almost $100 billion a year through fraud and criminal activity.
5. Step 36 would require all politicians to take and pass a course in basic economic theory so that they have at least a fighting chance of understanding how their excessive spending could destroy the country.
6. Step 39 is the most important step since it would impose strict term limits on politicians in office. If you have no chance of getting re-elected as a politician, then selling your soul for a few votes is no longer an option, freeing you up to make the hard decisions for the benefit of America. Janis Joplin once sang that "freedom is just another word for nothing else to lose." If you have nothing else to lose, i.e. you cannot get re-elected due to term limits, you now have the freedom to vote on what is best for the nation.

Americans have to understand that nothing else matters if the country goes bankrupt. Gay rights, education, clean energy, high speed rail, retirement funding, national security, police and fire protection, immigration reform, energy policy, medical costs and care, freedom, gun control, any issue that is important to you goes out the window if the economy collapses. Because if that happens you are left with only two choices: anarchy or martial law, neither of which would be pleasant and leave you living in a free, safe, and vibrant society. The only solution is to take our sour tasting, vomit inducing financial medicine by reducing spending on EVERY service the government provides, doing it in the least painful way possible, but understanding it will be painful.

CATO gets it, the Public Interest Research Group gets it, the National Taxpayer Foundation gets it, Obama's Deficit Reduction Commission gets it, the bipartisan Policy Center gets it, and those Americans that got polled by AP/NBC, voted at www.loathemygovernment.com, and voted for tea Party candidates get it, why don't the politicians get it? Oh, that's right. They are already making plans for the 2012 elections. Two years away and they are already more concerned about getting re-elected in 2012 then saving the country. Shameful.




Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.


Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment

The Bipartisan National Commission On Fiscal Responsibility and Reform - The Good and The Bad

I came across an article in Parade magazine this weekend on the National Commission On Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a commission appointed by President Obama, over the wishes of the Congress. The Commission is supposed to take upwards of a year exploring potential ways to get our obscene government spending under control. While I applaud the theory of the Commission, I have a few serious problems with its implementation:

- First, as I just stated, the Commission will take up to a year to finalize its findings and report. That is another year spent with skyrocketing Federal government deficit spending, adding another $1.4 TRILLION to our national debt. I would have much preferred that recommendations come out of the Commissions sequentially, as they were finalized, rather than waiting until all of the work was done and tied up in a nice bow. Many relatively easy cuts in government spending, some of which are listed below, could begin now.
- Second, while Obama put the Commission into place, he also has decided not to do anything immediate with Federal spending, using the Commission as air cover and an excuse not to get spending and the size of government under control sooner rather than later. In the meantime, another $1.4 TRILLION will be added to the national debt.
- If Obama really believed in and trusted the Commission, he would have given it much more support, with the most obvious support being to promise to incorporate all of the Commission's bipartisan findings in his next annual budget recommendation to Congress. This would have forced the political class in Congress to react to a bipartisan set of recommendations for cutting government spending. Now, without that support, there is no teeth in the Commissions findings, unlike previous commissions like the military base closing commission or the Grace Commission, where the output from these commissions forced politicians to make a public stand. By going this route, however, Obama can again take the coward's way out saying that he did his best to cut spending but Congress stopped him.
- This cowardly approach extends to Congress also. Both Pelosi and Reid have stated that they will take up a Commission recommendation if at least 14 out of 18 members of the Commission support a recommendation. Thus, the bar is set very high for anything to be considered by Congress, since 14 out of 18 means that about 78% of the Commission's members must support a recommendation for it to even be considered by Congress. Nowhere else in government, or real life, is the bar set this high to pass a law, enact an ordinance, etc. Why have Reid and Pelosi set it this high for cutting government spending? It is pretty obvious that they do not want to cut spending and reduce their personal power. Thus, without Obama giving the commission any teeth and the head politicians in Congress setting high bars even for consideration, it becomes pretty obvious that this Commission is set up for failure by the political class.
- And it is not as if they have set the bar too high. According to the article, their objective is to reduce the deficit by $240 billion a year by 2015. If you assume they reach this goal, they would have cut almost a TRILLION out of government spending by 2015. Certainly a great accomplishment but it would still be about $400 billion short of Obama's 2010 budget deficit.

How would I cut the federal budget without destroying the country? There are plenty of people smarter than me (and we will look at some of them with the Cato Institute's "Downsizing Government" initiative in future posts) but even I can come up with some easy cuts:

1. The Obama administration admitted earlier in the year in an Associated press article that the Federal government wastes almost $100 billion a year in fraudulent or just plain wasteful spending and bill payments. If put a much stricter auditing process in place to get that waste and fraud under control, assume that you could cut that amount in half and save $5o billion a year.
2. The Citizens Against Government Waste estimate that about $20 billion a year is wasted on politicians' earmarks embedded in the Federal budget, earmarks that are nothing more than thinly disguised bribes to get campaign donations for their re-election campaigns from individuals, businesses, unions, and lobbyists. If Step 44 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" was in place, we as a nation would save all of this $20 billion since none of it would fulfill the criteria of Step 44, i.e. each earmark does not significantly impact the citizens of five states. Another $20 billion saved, or $70 billion total.
3. According to a February, 2010 article in the Washington Times, from 1981 to 2008, the civilian/non-military workforce of the Federal government stayed consistently between 1.1 million and 1.2 million. However, since the onset of the Obama administration, the workforce has already jumped to 1,43 million civilian workers. Given that we have previously discussed the findings from numerous Federal audits and inspector generals that proved that dozens of SEC employees spent their workday surfing the Net for pornography, many in the Interior department responsible for oil rig safety were doing the same, employees in the Energy Department's EnergyStar program gave all submissions a high EnergyStar rating regardless of how poor the design was, etc., it is pretty obvious that there is a lot of headcount cutting that could go on in this workforce. If we assume we could just get the number of employees down to the long term average, say 1.15 million, and that the average Federal employee makes $100,000 when you load in all of the related benefits, we should be able to cut 280,000 Federal employees and save $28 billion in the process. We are now up to $98 billion in savings. The article goes on to point out that 46% of the Federal workforce is over 50 years of age so it is quite possible to reduce the majority of these positions through retirement and attrition without the current workforce suffering significant cuts.
4. Many times we have discussed the obscene number of U.S. troops deployed around the world, ready to fight a Cold War battle that will never occur. The most obvious deployments are Germany (over 50,000 U.S. troops), Japan, (over 30,000 troops), South Korea (almost 30,000) troops, England and Italy (about 10,000 troops in each country) and Kuwait (over 20,000 troops). These are troop deployments, over 150,000, that are left over from another era that needs to end. If it costs a million a year to deploy one U.S. troop into a combat zone (as the Obama adminstration has estimated), if we assume it costs half of that to deploy one U.S. troop in a non-combat zone, bringing home 80% of these deployed troops, 120,000, should save about $60 billion a year, or about $158 billion in total when combined with the previous steps.
5. Now if President Obama ever lived up to the promise of Candidate Obama and brought home our 100,000 troops from Iraq, we could conservatively save another $50 billion a year, bringing our grand total from just these five ideas to $208 billion a tear.

Just these five steps, from somebody who is not steeped in Federal budgeting processes, has just saved $208 billion a year without even trying and without damaging our national security or resulting in massive layoffs of Federal employees. The politicians would not be happy since we would have deprived them of a prime source of funding for their perpetual re-election campaigns but who cares. Those who intentionally defraud the government or accept payments they should not receive due to government billing incompetencies, would also not be happy but again, who cares.

Our approach would easily get the Commission to almost 80% of the first year's $240 billion target. By following some of the steps laid out in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," they could also realize the following significant savings (see the details for justifying each step in the book):

• Step 9 - eliminate the traditional pension benefit for all future Federal government hires. Most people in the private sector no longer can get into a traditional pension program, the same should hold true for government employees.
• Step 11 - prohibit anyone with assets worth over $3 million form drawing a Social Security check in order to help preserve the fiscal integrity of the system. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc. do not need to be drawing checks from a teetering budget process.
• Step 12 - raise the retirement age to 70, with an exception if a financial hardship can be proven. We are living longer than ever and the retirement age has not taken that into account.
• Step 13 - stop funding the Democratic and Republican national conventions, make their national committees pay for everything including security.
• Step 41 - make all Congressional members whose net worth is over $3 million serve without drawing a salary. Makes no sense for very rich members of Congress, e.g. John Kerry, to draw a salary when the national debt is soaring. He and others will not miss the $170,000 or so they would have been getting.
• Step 42 - make ex-President's pay for some of their security in their retirement if their earnings or assets exceed certain thresholds.
• Step 47 - remove the Federal government from having any thing to do with subsidizing the farm industry and subsidizing any component the national transportation system, returning those responsibilities to the states or letting them fade away into oblivion. The Federal government wastes hundreds of billions a year in both areas without a discernible benefit to the vast majority of Americans

I could go on and on but you get the idea. It is not hard to reduce the size of government as long as we have the politicians in place that have the guts to do it. That is why it is so important to make the right decisions in November. Dump the incumbents should be your first choice if we ever want to get our national debt under control. It is unlikely the Commission has the power to do that, only we do.


Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/