Sunday 17 July 2011
Just a couple of problems with Randall’s ideas
1) Eliminating education, energy foreign aid, housing assistance, food and nutrition assistance, other income security spending, community development and regional development cuts over 100,000 jobs, which send our unemployment costs soaring. It also involves us in contract close-out costs that cannot be avoided without triggering a major downgrade of the USA
2) Similarly, closing military bases costs more in the year of closure, not less – the savings aren’t until later.
3) Zeroing out some programs throws babies out with bathwater (e.g. Commerce Dept & MEP, Transport & infrastructure projects) and there go another 100,000 jobs plus losses in overseas trade that further depress the economy.
4) The cuts to law enforcement& justice mean that we can put and keep people in prison, but cannot catch much of anyone, so crime rates will rise dramatically.
5) The cuts to Veteran Benefits mean more homeless vets and more wounded ex-troops left to rot in dingy hallway cots.
6) The cuts to food and nutrition programs mean the US
However, given those few caveats, your program might work, even if they did trigger a world-wide great depression: short term pain, long term gain.At the same time, if we removed all the corporate welfare (farm subsidies, steel subsidies, coal oil & gas subsidies, airline subsidies, etc) and repealed the tax cuts (that the last government pushed through immorally to buy votes in time of war), it would generate a couple hundred billion a year to pay down the national debt (call treasury bonds) and hence lower our interest payments while taking a big load off of our grandchildren..
# posted by Had It in Holland Park @ 01:38 
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