Prioritizing government spending.
Here's one I think our divided political viewpoints can come together on.
Fiscal conservatism means, in the simplest terms, not spending money like a drunken sailor, and most certainly not on nonessential projects. Liberals and progressives and other assorted socially responsible types believe that the role of government is to give people an assist when they are in trouble. It's why we have a military... one for all and all for one, if someone invades our country, we rise up and kill that son of a gun. And we do it as one united front. It's also why we have disaster relief... when people are drowning in New Orleans, we send people to help. Rescue teams and trained folks who know how to react in those situations. It's part of our common humanity that we have a designated group of trained, experienced, paid people who go do this, or at least have a core of professionals who are the first on the scene, with volunteers and charities who help from the private sector. That takes money, and no one wants such programs to go underfunded.
One thing we seem to agree on is that when people are in serious trouble, that's what the government is for: it should do something for that. Where we tend to disagree is on most of everything else it does. If it is non-essential, how can we justify forcing people to give up their private property, their earned or saved monies, to contribute to a project they may not even need, and we don't even need? I don't care how progressive you are, there are some kinds of spending you'd scoff at, and rightly so. I'd wager there are very few people around who truly believe that we have a right to take everyone's money and spend it on any old thing.
So, long story as short as I can make it, what's the deal with these wasteful government projects, approved in equal measure by liberals and conservative politicians alike, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents?
I am told the following things:
- Other states do it, so it's okay for mine to do so.
- The people in my state pay into the federal pot, and getting as much of that money back for my state is kind of like reducing taxes... the money stays in my state.
- These projects create jobs and stimulate the economy.
And so on and so forth.
Meanwhile, I am told that we have the following problems on our hands:
- Our nation is experiencing a huge federal deficit.
- Our nation is trillions of dollars in debt already.
- Many of our state budgets are bleeding money, and essential services are being shut down or reduced in scope.
- We have two wars we're fighting.
- We have allies who need financial assistance in some way or other.
- We have staggering unemployment, and unemployment compensation is running out of money.
- We have millions and millions who can't afford health insurance premiums, and then health insurers can kick you out for little or no reason.
- We have millions of homeowners who are behind on their mortgage, and that in turn is causing our banks to require federal assistance.
- Social Security and medicare, vital systems that millions rely on, are going to go broke.
Now, this second list doesn't make politicians think twice about spending other people's money on:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100425/...eways_for_fish
Endangered Trout.
I find that to be a little bit morally reprehensible.
What are our priorities?
In my estimation:
1. Making sure nobody sets off nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons on our shores (or anywhere else, frankly), and generally trying to stop invasions or terrorist acts.
2. Rescuing our citizens in cases of earthquake, fire, flood, or other disasters.
3. Catching rapists and murderers and bank robbers, putting them on trial, and then putting them in jail if found guilty.
4. Making sure old people and the disabled can afford to eat.
5. Making sure a Doctor gets paid when he treats someone who has no job.
To me, all of the above is some part of saving and protecting lives. Some people disagree on number five. Some people think that it's not the federal government's job to do number 4 either, and some people think that it's up to the local law enforcement to do number 3, and yadda yadda.
But what I see is if we cannot even do one through five, then WHY are we spending money on ANYTHING else? Is anything else more important? Is anything else more vital? Explain.
Why is a fish more important than a healthcare system? Why is a bridge to nowhere more important than funding social security? Why is a space program more important than underfunded law enforcement programs? Why is a bank bailout the solution, when you could just give a bailout to the home owners who have those bad loans, and repay the banks, and then the banks don't go under and people own their own houses?
Maybe I'm not understanding, and I'm hoping someone will educate me. But why are we subsidizing corn, when we don't have enough money to subsidize unemployed people or social security?
Some call for government works projects to create jobs. Some even say "pay people to dig ditches, and then fill those ditches" to combat unemployment. Well that's fine, but not everyone can dig a ditch or do manual labor of that kind. Not all of that money reaches the locales which have unemployment. If you're willing to pay people to dig a ditch you don't even need, then why can't you afford the unemployment compensation? Why can't you afford paying doctors to treat the sick? Why can't you bailout those who can't pay their mortgage?
If you spend the money there, where does it go?
1. Unemployment compensation goes DIRECTLY back into the economy. They spend it on food, rent, and bills. The capitalist economy gets close to 100% of that money right back, and you have people who aren't starving! You don't get that kind of return on subsidizing corn. Dollar for dollar, that does not give as many people a safety net, and it causes people to permanently rely on government spending on corn to even have a job. That's not a solution. Given the choice between unemployment checks which don't cover **** and a job that pays minimum wage, guess where I'm going? Anything is better than unemployment, so when there's a job, I'm gone. Working off of money which subsidizes corn means I'll be relying on that government money forever, until I find another job. So all it is, is really expensive unemployment compensation. It's the same thing, just less efficient, and the corn-growing industry which needs no help gets to benefit from government assistance.
2. Paying a doctor to treat the sick. Where does that go? Well if it goes into his pocket, he tends to spend it on consumer goods, or he invests that money in savings accounts or other investments. And he's providing a necessary service, and that money goes back into the economy. It's about saving lives and making sure doctors are paid for their well-trained services. How can you go wrong here?
3. Helping those who are "underwater" as it pertains to their mortgage would send 100% of that money right back to the very banks that were whining about not being paid. I seem to recall we spent a lot of money on those banks, and they paid their executives very well and gave out lots of bonuses, which is fine. And they started back up with the credit swaps and derivatives like the responsible stewards of our economy that they are, good for them. But many of those who still owe on their loans are still in trouble and nothing has been resolved. You could have helped those banks and the loanholders at the same time, by directly addressing the problem. Helping those loanholders would help pay off the banks, and reduce the amount of homelessness and foreclosure and help our housing market recover, and maybe even turn our economy around. So you get a direct benefit from every dollar you spend there. If you're going to "stimulate" the economy, doing that would do a lot more good than reducing taxes by a small fraction for people who are already paying low taxes and already spend their money comfortably. Instead you've got people on the street, houses that are empty, the housing market totally depressed, and banks still not getting their money back, but we bailed them out and now the money is all spent. What did we accomplish? I'm either naive or that's totally absurd.
Bottom line is that we can't afford to waste money, now more than ever, and as a general principle, when handling other people's money, you really have to justify every dollar spent. So when I see subsidies for nonessential items, when I see projects to protect fish and not protect people, when I see budgets and essential services being bled to death, with two wars going on, and taxes are being lowered... I get a little sick to my stomach. Every dollar spent on one thing is another dollar not spent on another, more essential thing. Every one of those million dollars for the trout recovery effort could have been used to cover the costs of several patient's medical bills who couldn't afford to pay, or extend unemployment coverage for a hundred people, or to keep many dozens of families in their homes.
What did you get for your million dollars?
Something that didn't work as advertised and needed to be replaced for 25 million dollars.For example, the United Conservation District in Ventura needs to replace a 20-year-old $1.5 million ladder at a cost of up to $25 million, according to general manager Michael Solomon.
Government spends wisely once again.
Third party solution?
You want to have a third party, a tea party, some kind of taxpayers' union or outsider political party that challenges Republicans and Democrats? You would get far with a party based purely on the above philosophy, one that I BELIEVE liberals and conservatives would agree on, and that's adjusting spending priorities. I haven't even talked about touching the tax rates, or overhauling the tax code to look for loopholes, or anything all that controversial. If you had a platform based purely on prudent, efficient spending, and cutting waste and fraud and moving that money where it could be used wisely, to get a bigger bang for your trillions of federal bucks, and maybe a bigger bang for your (I don't even know how much) State budget bucks, then you might go far.
Why these third parties fail is because they go somewhere ideological that the Democrats or the Republicans have already cornered the market on. You want to have a controversial, ideological, partisan position on social morality or abortion or hold a non-mainstream position on secession or abolishing the IRS or things of that nature, and you'll never get anywhere. That's not pragmatic or realistic. You can vote how you want, but a party built on those ideas won't win elections, or you already have a Republican or Democratic politician who supports your view.
As for managing or mismanaging our money, which is about 90% of what the government does, you need to have a broad-appeal, mainstream, single-issue party which can usurp the entrenched pork lovers in the Democratic and Republican parties, and reclaim our money and spend it properly, completely re-adjust our spending priorities and fix issues in the system like campaign financing. Then, job done, that party needs to go away or split up into other issue-based parties which may disagree on hot button issues, and go nowhere on abortion or gay rights or what have you. Fine, go back to your squabbles that will probably never be resolved. But can you not come together on basic, common sense (expletive)? Just for that one issue, which I know most of you agree on?
Seriously.
Even if you disagree with half of what I've said, or don't share the same perspective as what my perspective is, you know as well as I do that there's immense amounts of government spending that is totally unwise and unethical, not prudent and wasteful. We might agree just enough to put someone in charge who could get something done about it, and then when it is done, then we can go back to disagreeing on other issues.
There's obviously a lot of disgust with both parties at the moment, and there's no time like the present to challenge incumbents with a third party candidate or even a Republican/Democrat who pledges to adhere to anti-waste and prudent spending principles. You don't really even need a whole new third party unless there isn't a viable candidate in either party who agrees with the platform. Change can happen and it wouldn't be outlandish to believe it could.
So, what about a party platform? Is it possible that we as citizens can cut out the middleman and agree amongst ourselves what is necessary and vital, and what is not? Is it really so controversial to say that spending 25 million dollars on trout recovery is less important than funding medicare or paying cops?
A platform we can agree on
Can we agree on stuff like that? I challenge you... if you care about this issue, please post your thoughts, and highlight what you think should be part of this party platform against wasteful spending. The caveat is, I don't want you to say "simply stop spending the money", or "raise taxes" because that talks about adjusting how much in total we spend or take in to fund services. That's a separate, and might I add, ideological issue we will be divided on. The premise here is, if we're going to spend X number of trillion dollars based on Y percentage of tax rate, and that's what we are given to start with, where does the money go? Deal with tax rates and how much we spend in total somewhere else, and assume for the sake of argument we have the same tax rate and same spending rate, since we're spending the money anyway and adjusting the tax rate is controversial.
Discuss, or tell me I talk too much. I don't care. I just needed to express this. If you can, focus on what we might be able agree on. If you completely disagree with me, then say so, but allow us who do agree to have our discussion.
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Originally Posted by KukriKhan
it... 
....entitlement spending....
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