So Republicans got hustled on their paltry budget cuts. What a surprise. Meanwhile, the Tea Party is busy fixing what’s wrong with America by tinkering with abortion rules and gun control laws.
This is an excellent way to blow a once-in-a-generation opportunity. It seems obvious to me that what needs to be cut is not spending but regulation. If the Feds dumped OSHA, for example, that would not only not only cut the budget by all those staff lines, it would result in an “economic miracle” of new productivity. The same would be true at the state and municipal level. Less government means more wealth twice: Fewer “broken windows” and the added productivity that results from investing the money that would otherwise have been wasted on regulatory broken windows.
This is something Realtors and other real estate professionals can be doing in this unprecedented moment: Teaching the Tea Partiers what matters in an emergency and what can wait for calmer seas. Quoted below is economist Thomas Sowell with an excellent idea: Get America’s billionaire tax-vampires off our necks:
Trying to reduce the deficit by cutting spending runs into an old familiar counterattack. There will be all kinds of claims by politicians and sad stories in the media about how these cuts will cause the poor to go hungry, the sick to be left to die, etc.
My plan would start by cutting off all government transfer payments to billionaires. Many, if not most, people are probably unaware that the government is handing out the taxpayers’ money to billionaires. But agricultural subsidies go to a number of billionaires. Very little goes to the ordinary farmer.
Big corporations also get big bucks from the government, not only in agricultural subsidies but also in the name of “green” policies, in the name of “alternative energy” policies, and in the name of whatever else will rationalize shoveling the taxpayers’ money out the door to whomever the administration designates — for its own political reasons.
The usual political counterattacks against spending cuts will not work against this new kind of spending-cut approach. How many heart-rending stories can the media run about billionaires who have lost their handouts from the taxpayers? How many tears will be shed if General Motors gets dumped off the gravy train?
It would also be eye-opening to many people to discover how much government money is going into subsidizing all sorts of things that have nothing to do with helping “the poor” or protecting the public. This would include government-subsidized insurance for posh and pricey coastal resorts that are located too dangerously close to the ocean for a private insurance company to risk insuring them.
This approach would not only circumvent the sob stories, it would also circumvent the ideological battles over whether to cut off money to Planned Parenthood or National Public Radio.
The money to be saved by cutting off agricultural subsidies to the wealthy and the big corporations is vastly greater than the money to be saved by cutting off Planned Parenthood or National Public Radio, much as they both deserve to be cut off.
Sean Purcell says:
Sowell is brilliant, as usual. But I’m not sure his idea would be any easier. The fiscal conservatives shoot themselves in the foot every time they mention a program like Planned Parenthood or NPR; it gives the NOOMPs a peg to hang their hat on.
But cutting welfare to billionaires would get even more blowback, despite that blowback being a harder sell. Why? Because the game of politics (for us cynically minded) is a simple one: buy votes with spending.
People do what they do and once they’re doing it, they desperately wish to continue (assuming they were right in their choice). Politicians want nothing so much but to be politicians. They gain that through the votes they buy. This is a drinking game and the billionaires bring the kegs. All those other little programs are just so many pretty bottles and fancy snacks. They make for nice trappings and an easy sell, but the drunkards know better.
April 13, 2011 — 10:25 am
Mark Brian says:
Sorry Greg, this makes entirely too much sense to ever happen…..
April 13, 2011 — 12:11 pm
Brian Brady says:
I never thought about the cost of the regulators to the taxpayers, just the cost of regulation to industry. Reducing the Federal Register is like having cake AND ice cream
April 13, 2011 — 7:54 pm
Greg Swann says:
I can remember being on the phone with you from Orlando, at StarPower. I was talking to you about the opportunity costs of the 1789 constitution. I deliberately ignored all the destruction until then, just focused on the Hamiltonian betrayal of the Spirit of ’76, the American ideal of individualism that was the philosophical undergirding of the American Revolution. I invited you to calculate the damage that had been done to wealth by Rotarian Socialism, starting then and at an accelerating pace since then. Costs plus opportunity costs plus the compound interest value of those costs, over time, plus the attending opportunities lost as that interest does not compound, and the attending compound interest, etc. I challenged you to tell me how much richer we might be, by now, had we all simply earned our keep, instead of always trying to hitch a ride on our neighbor’s back. I’m sure you thought I was nuts at the time.
It gets worse, though. The only capital that matters is human capital. The worst cost Rotarian Socialism inflicts on a once-free people is in the destruction of the human mind. Laws that are malum prohibitum (wrong because forbidden) outlaw the mind. That’s their purpose. But compliance entails mindlessness, which is easily habituated. Sucking up to power requires pretense, another kind of mindlessness. As power accumulates, education is curtailed, especially education in philosophy and logic. And eventually, a too astute awareness becomes a life-shortening attribute. So add the willful destruction of human capital, the sole source of values and of value itself, into the calculations.
This is the price we are all paying for refusing to live as we are, as individuals, and for insisting that we must live as we cannot, as symbiotes, as parasites.
April 13, 2011 — 10:53 pm
Jim Klein says:
I’m tellin’ ya—the fault lies entirely at the feet of (subsidized!) philosophers: the more “profound,” the more at fault. Sine qua non.
In epistemology, they have spent their wasted time trying to prove one assertion, and it’s finally come to pass that nearly everyone accepts it, both as principle and in daily action.
That claim? “Maybe logic doesn’t hold.” A belief in that claim is absolutely, positively guaranteed to lead to death. It’s only a question of when and how, and how ugly. I’m trying to do my part to stop this madness, so I posted a simple starting point at Splendorquest.com
April 14, 2011 — 8:41 am
Brian Brady says:
“I challenged you to tell me how much richer we might be, by now, had we all simply earned our keep, instead of always trying to hitch a ride on our neighbor’s back. I’m sure you thought I was nuts at the time.”
I didn’t think you were nuts but cruel (at the time). It’s a natural human emotion to be angry with the first guy who tells you the truth. Enlightenment comes when we move from disdain with the messenger to comprehension of the message.
The message is important, Greg and I’m grateful for that lesson among the others you impart. Rather than dwell on the “imagine what could have been”, I’m trying to understand “what can still be achieved”. As you stated, it all begins within our minds so I’ve had to open mine to possibilities which I formerly considered novel or antiquated.
I may have been born in Philadelphia but Orlando will always be my personal “Cradle of Liberty”. That phone conversation we had, and Bloodhound weekend on Swallow Road, makes Orlando a very special place to me.
April 15, 2011 — 9:54 am