TANSTAAFL!

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I was looking at the latest available numbers for the federal budget (fiscal 2023).

Mandatory
Social Security $1.3 trillion 1,300,000,000,000
Medicare  $839 billion 839,000,000,000
Medicaid $616 billion 616,000,000,000
Welfare $448 billion 448,000,000,000
Other $502 billion 502,000,000,000
subtotal 3,705,000,000,000
Discretionary
Defense $805 billion 805,000,000,000
Non-Defense $917 billion 917,000,000,000
subtotal 1,722,000,000,000
Interest on the Debt $659 billion 659,000,000,000
Grand Total 6,086,000,000,000

And we only brought in about 4.4 trillion in revenue that year so we ran a deficit of about $1.7 trillion dollars. And that is equal to all of the “discretionary” spending which by the way includes all of defense spending. Now that is a grim picture.  But as the kids say, “It is what it is.”  What we should be shooting for is a budget that doesn’t exceed our revenues minus our debt payment.  So, our budget should be around $3.74 trillion dollars.  Or roughly speaking we have to trim the budget by 40%.

That’s a lot.  But you know, I’ll bet it’s about in line with the amount of waste we could delete from the budget if honest people were looking at it.  Even line items like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are riddled with inefficiency and featherbedding employment practices that a determined auditor could ferret out and eliminate.  If Elon Musk could fire 70% of the staff at Twitter without any noticeable diminution in the capability of the business surely the federal bureaucracy can be pared back by 40% without too much trouble.  Let’s face it automation probably already does most of the work that these people get credit for.

It may not be possible to reduce all that spending within a year or even four years but what is needed is a detailed plan to do just that. The plan needs to be a continuous improvement process that allows managers to apply metrics that tell them how many people to remove from the system on a monthly basis and how the remaining human resources are allocated and rated to determine who stays and who goes.  It will be as murderous and cutthroat as the private sector is.  Basically, it will be hell for bureaucrats and many of them will run away screaming just to avoid the stress.  But it is exactly what’s needed.  We can’t afford to make the federal government a jobs program for the dim-witted and lazy people who can’t make it in the private sector.  At the very least the first thing we should do is lower all salaries by 40%.  And I understand there may be some lower paid employees for which this is an unreasonable cut.  But that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis.  But it’s a good estimate for what we’re trying to do.  And as far as boondoggles, we know there are plenty of those.  Probably not two and half trillion dollars’ worth but still plenty to trim.

And let’s be honest.  We all probably benefit from many programs that will have to be cut.  So be it.  Everybody will have to suck it up to some extent.  Who knows, it may turn out that we can’t have free Chat GPT because it’s really paid for by our tax dollars.  Fine.  We’ll have to pay for that and probably a whole bunch of other things ourselves.  Well, in the words of RAH, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

12FEB2025 – No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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If you attempted to access the site today for some period between 9am and 10 am EST you may have seen the dreaded 404 ERROR message on your screen.  And so did I!  A week or so ago I upgraded my site.  I needed more memory and resources.

And so for a day I experienced some wonky stuff where my posting disappeared and my hair fell out and I turned into a werewolf briefly.  But then everything was okay.  Well, today I was on-line and doing this and that when suddenly my connection to the site turned into that 404 ERROR message.  I tried the limited things I could think of and they were completely ineffective.  Then I went to my site host and started crying and shrieking and after about an hour of fiddling with settings it got fixed.

They never warned me this was going to happen.  To be fair it’s more complicated than that.  They didn’t check to see if I had a particular firewall arrangement that has to be aligned with any changes to the host IP address.  But as everyone knows I’m the lamest web master in the multiverse so there was no chance of me anticipating the problem that came up.

Anyway, apologies for any interruption to your viewing pleasure and back to the show.

Stamp Out the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard Once and for All!

photog Current Events, Fake Science, Science, Trump , , ,

The latest EPA scam to prevent energy production employs a favorite old ploy.  Namely, create a full species out of a small slightly differentiated population of some animal (in this case lizards) and then claim this new species is endangered because there are so few of them.  And the difference between the two populations can be almost non-existent.  A different number of scales on their chins or a slightly smaller overall average length or whatever.  Now the truth of this is that every species with a large enough range develops slight regional variation.  And things like color will vary in order to blend with local conditions.  Even over short time spans moths have been known to genetically select for darker or lighter color based upon the advantage in blending into backgrounds that had more or less coal dust in different parts of London in the 20th century.

So here comes the dunes sagebrush lizard (Sceloporus arenicolus) a small drab creature that is part of a family that includes 114 so-called species that extend from New York State to California and from the Canadian border to Panama.  And even more pathetic, until very recently (1972) the arenicolus was considered just a subspecies of the sagebrush lizard (Sceloporus graciosus) which is in no way endangered.  Now government funded biologists live to produce new species in order to have a reason to apply for a government fund to study this new endangered species.  And as you’ll read in this article, the dunes sagebrush lizard is disappearing because oil and gas are being extracted from its home range.

My thought is, “Too damn bad!”

Let’s suppose that what they say is true.  Oil and gas extraction is bad for the very important lizard and if extraction is expanded then the very important lizard will go extinct.  Dead, gone, buried, finished.  Well, guess what.  In twenty years, the sagebrush lizards on the other side of the dune will begin moving into that territory left vacant by the demise of the dunes sagebrush lizards that were just too delicate to make it.  And in a hundred years they will adapt to the exact climate in that dune environment and guess what?  They will look and actually be indistinguishable from the extinct dunes sagebrush lizard cousins they replaced.  Hooray for evolution!

So, my advice to President Trump is to have his EPA not only delete the dunes sagebrush lizard from the endangered species list but also reclassify it as a subspecies of the sagebrush lizard and forget about it forever.  And while they’re at it do a review of all the other endangered species to see how many of them are subspecies with tiny ranges that have been elevated to full species rank just so that their range can be excluded from useful human activities like building houses and fishing in lakes and drilling for oil.

In the same way that Democrats use the USAID as a piggy bank to fund their wish list of stupid causes, the National Science Foundation is a source for endless grant money for things like inventing endangered species and spending whole careers walking around studying these unimportant populations of common species for no meaningful reason.  Being the champion and greatest living authority on the dunes sagebrush lizard should be a badge of shame.  And at the very least should be a pursuit unfunded by the United States federal government (in my opinion).

How Many Generals Has Pete Fired?

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February has been keeping me busy with snow and ice removal.  Three snowfalls in one week are predicted.  And the day job has been hectic.  But I’ve managed to write several thousand words on my story this week which is pretty good.  I follow as best I can in the news how Trump is doing in his epic assault on the “managerial state.”  We’ve reached the point in the dance where various Obama-appointed federal judges will veto everything he does.  It’ll be interesting to see if he honors the decisions or just ignores them.  I rather hope he just goes full speed ahead and deals with the consequences later.  It would be so much quicker to just make the changes and let the Deep State deal with a fait accompli.

I didn’t see the game but I watched a few minutes of post-Super Bowl celebrations going on in Philadelphia.  A mob of inebriated cretinous goons combined their strength to yank a traffic light pole out of the ground, smash it with their hands and feet and then throw into the back of an enormous dump truck that they somehow got their hands on.  Unfortunately, it fell out of the truck and onto several of their fellow rioters.  But obviously a good time was had by all.  Ah, the transformative energy of sports.  I’m sure the City of Brotherly Love will rise to new heights on the spiritual boost this championship will provide.  Well, anyway, the rioting, looting and arson probably won’t continue much past Monday.

The world situation grows more chaotic by the week.  The Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange seems to be wobbling and the Ukraine war grinds brutally on.  Trump’s latest tariff project seems to involve imports of aluminum and steel.  I believe we get a lot of aluminum from Canada.  The hydroelectricity in Quebec makes Canadian aluminum competitive with any other world producers.  I’m not sure if Trump is taking another slap at Trudeau.  I think a lot of the steel comes out of China.  I wonder if Trump is serious about that.  It would be a real shot across the bow of Xi Jinping’s economy.  We’ll see.

I’m curious to see if Trump will give a speech where he lays out his big plan for the changes he’s making to government spending.  I mean, it’s great that he’s shutting down the patronage and pork at USAID and other left-wing fronts.  And reducing the federal payroll by as much as possible is also admirable.  But I tend to think that he has some bigger, more comprehensive program in the works.  Now maybe he wants to wait until he’s put out some of these fires like the judges blocking his executive orders.  And maybe he’s working with the Congressional Republicans to push forward some large bill that contains a lot of the items he intends to use to transform the economy.  But right now, it’s very hard to tell what’s going forward and what’s been halted.

I guess I’ll have to be patient for a few more weeks.  After all he hasn’t been in office even a month yet.  It just seems longer because of all the activity he’s produced.  I’m impatiently waiting for Patel, Kennedy and Gabbard to get their votes in the Senate.  I feel like that’s dragging.  But that’s not Trump’s fault.  The Senate Republicans are a sorry looking lot and can barely keep from tripping over their own feet.  But one thing I’d like to hear about is how many generals Pete Hegseth has fired this week.  I think maybe that’s the metric I would use to gauge the effectiveness of the Trump administration.  Yep that’s the one.