It this were the case then why is our government and a host of others worldwide; flat, dead broke and on the verge of going bellyup while showing ever less ‘tangible’ benefits to their citizens…? / : |

Carl Nemo **==

Politics is the art of the possible.

Further, any govt that operates as other than a business will go bankrupt in short order. We’re there. And that’s not defeatism talking, just the facts.

As for being a hammer? I’d smash all the socialist crap that’s weighting us down, replace it with true freedom of opportunity instead of the trendy egalitarian redistribution of wealth that is reducing us all, and say to everyone: Better get out there and make your way as best you can, because the rest of the world is moving as fast as it can to eclipse us, and it will happen if we don’t get a move on.

So I’m not trying to destroy anything. Quite the contrary. That seems to be the province of all you pollyannas who believe that we’re involved in “business as usual”.

You clearly don’t know anything about me except that we disagree on how to make our country’s future brighter. Govt is not the only – nor the best – mechanism to provide for our success. To wit, if the Pell grants of which you speak were so hot, we’d not be in such bad shape regarding the “education” of our countrymen, who are outranked by many foreigners.

As for pols making the rules and funding the “games”… read my link again and see where that’s gotten us.

A government is not a business. A government is a social management structure (inherently “socialist”, whether you like it or not). Businesses must operate in a fairly narrow system of transactions that have nearly immediate effects on the company (direct benefit-cost choices).

A government operates on a larger view of benefit-cost effects that allows for extended transactional strings that can (should) create multiple benefits that are not all normally accounted for in dollars, but aggregate tangible and intangible benefits.

For the record, I don’t revere any Congressionals; I happen to believe that they tend to be just as stupid as the rest of us, complete with unwise, short-term reactions to events. The suggestion I made of impotence relates to the attitude that an ordinary person can have no effect on our system of social management.

Everything the Gummit does is not bad. Everything the Gummit does is not good. Give up if you want and indulge in impotence, I’m not going to share that defeatism with you, Al the Hammer.

Yes, you are absolutely correct. Cutting programs saves money. But to say that eliminating all such spending is good because of the savings is where you may not be right. Meat-axe surgeries usually end in hemorrhage and death of the patient. It is oh so easy to say eliminate all fed spending on state/local programs. But what in the HELL happens to the people who benefited from the programs at the state and local level? My challenge to you was to do the cost-benefit analyses to show what the real cost of cutting a program was. All you have shown is that there is an immediate benefit directly to the taxpayer in not spending money.

Take Pell Grants, for instance. Setting aside the problems with the for-profit institutions which have been making huge sums of money, what would be the cost to the community in denying lower-income students the opportunity to get an education? The benefit in the short run is very obvious. Money not spent. But what happens when we perpetuate and exacerbate the gap between the haves and the have-nots? Everyone is decrying the increasing gaps between wealthy and poor strata in our society. So what do we do about that gap? Oh, of course! Stop funding any attempt to help the poor get an education which makes them just a little bit better-qualified to move up the economic scale just a bit.

I hasten to point out, however, that there exists a similar cogent argument for the other side of the equation. To justify the payout of the Pell Grants it is necessary to show that there is a benefit to society that approximates the cost of the grants. It is the weighing of these factors that we must perforce leave to the politicians who make the rules and fund the games. In a microcosmic sense that’s all we are discussing here and usually elsewhere.

The real bottom line on this seems to be:

Screw the poor; I’ve got mine and I am by GOD going to keep it because when you get right down to it I don’t give a rodent’s rear about the plight of anyone except myself. This is the ultimate NIMBY.

Our primary debt just surpassed $7T… not to mention entitlements. The INTEREST on the primary debt in 2009 was $383B. Pork barrel spending in 2009 was $19.6B – a BIG DEAL, eh? Will eliminating pork pay down the debt that has us near (IN) bankruptcy? Hell, no.

Impotent? It’s the Fed and those Congressionals you revere that are impotent, as well as incompetent. Many of us here on CHB have proposed economic fixes for years. And fixes that certainly would have gone much further to put our country back in the black than merely controlling the flow of targeted dollars back to the folks at home.

Eliminating the dept of education would have saved $45B in 2009, and eliminating all federal spending on state-and local-level programs would save hundreds of billions more. Doing away with unfunded federal mandates that states and local govts have to pay for would free up additional money that could be used to manage their local programs.

Have a look at our plight – including all the linked references therein – and maybe you’ll recalibrate a bit. We’re in deep shit Tonto…

http://neithercorp.us/npress/

GHL proposed language a year ago for Congress to end the unreasonable corporate rights fantasy… CHB ranters response? Silence.

Now GHL proposes a realistic avenue to controlling pork… CHB ranters response? Ridicule.

“Impotent assholes” is a phrase that comes to mind.

I, for one, will send the suggestion to my Congressionals.

Thank you, GHL.

How about eliminating the dept of education? Oh, I forgot – the NEA would be upset. Never mind.

OK. It’s your turn to come up with a workable idea. I know mine is, since just the adverse publicity about a particular piece of pork is enough to kill it generally,; also I know that things like “cut everything 25 percent across the board” are not only unworkable but dangerous to the well-being of the United States and her individual citizens.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to propose for reduction or elimination individual programs or budget items. To be workable, though, you would have to explain why the particular program needs to be cut, along with weighing the pros and cons.

My proposal didn’t have such stringent criteria because it was aimed at pork, which is politically vulnerable. To cut or eliminate existing programs is an entirely different thing though because, unlike limited duration pork projects, the programs subject to scrutiny will have several if not many supporters.

An example of such a program might be Pell Grants. Many people believe that the approximately $10 billion in such grants every years is a waste of money. To justify a cut one would have to specify not only the amount cut but what the pros and cons are. Without justification, cuts are politically unlikely to happen. Of course, Pells are to some extent questionable because of the apparently fraudulent activities of many for-profit educational facilities, most egregiously the University of Phoenix conglomerate. It would be easy to suggest doing away with Pell Grants to students who want to attend such institutions, but to go farther becomes more problematical.

But remember, it was you who said “roll back programs that need to be pared.” You would have to justify what “needs to be pared.” Go ahead — give it a shot.