Tag: reduce government

Just a Regular Old Thursday in the Age of Trump

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The increasingly shrill and desperate shrieks coming from bureaucrats and Democrats is truly music to the ears of hard-pressed taxpayers everywhere.  DOGE has found the mother lode and shutting off the spigots that siphon off billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the coffers of cronies and crooks at NGOs around the world is the greatest act of American patriotism since the Revolutionary War was fought by an army of ragtag lunatics two hundred and fifty odd years ago.  If Trump follows up on all of the executive orders he’s written and defends them against the fake judges attacking from all sides he has the potential of getting his face (and hair) on Mt. Rushmore.

And now he’s beginning to address Ukraine.  He’s begun discussions with Putin and Zelensky.  That’s going to be a long story but he’s begun well.  Those negotiations will be long and difficult.  A war that’s killed over a million men isn’t ended by turning a switch.  The Russians and the Ukrainians are fighting a grudge war and even though it’s going against the Ukrainians they haven’t given up yet.  In their desperation they might try some pretty awful things and that would make the Russians even angrier.  Probably the smartest course for us is to convince Ukraine that the longer this thing goes, the worse will be the eventual outcome for them.  Of course, most of this is the fault of American neo-cons who were responsible for the color revolution that installed the crazies in Kiev.  If we hadn’t provided them with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of arms and assurances that they would win, they never would have taken on the Russian bear and they would still have all of their land and all of their men.  Crazy.

So, what’s next?  We’ve become so jaded that we expect every day will include another Trumpian miracle.  Another attack on the Left and its stooges.  Well, they keep coming.  Gabbard and Kennedy are in office and Patel was just advanced to the full Senate for a vote.  All of that is going well.  I read that the Justice Department has halted the prosecution of New York Mayor Adams and because of that the lead federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York resigned in protest.  Well, if she can’t have her politically motivated prosecution, she’s gonna take her ball and go home.  Boo Hoo!

As Chemist mentioned in the comments yesterday, DOGE thinks they can shave trillion dollars off the price tag for social security and the other entitlements.  That’s not all the way to where we have to get but it’s about 40% of the way there.  That’s definitely nothing to sneeze at.  So initial indications are that the Trump administration and the Congressional Republicans are moving in the right direction to start fixing some of the biggest problems that plague us.  It’s hard to be critical of what’s going on so far.

In other news tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and I’ve agreed to spring for some Thai food and treat Camera Girl to a drive in my luxury sedan (well sort of) around the beautiful Dunwich environs.  We can make this trip because I spent the morning shoveling slush and water off of the driveway in anticipation of tonight’s deep freeze.  I reminded her of my prudence and diligence in attending to this situation and how her frail womanliness would never have been capable of the exertion and the sheer strengthliness of my manly effort.  She feigned indifference but I could sense her awe.

I’ve added a revolt within the ranks of the good guys in my story.  It sort of came out of nowhere but I now think it’s a good way to add tension and give the main character a chance to prove his leadership and shift the action away from the King of the Mole Men who is really more of a sage and businessman than a man of action.  I’m imagining a sort of St Crispin’s Day speech to rally the troops and head into the final crisis (whatever it turns out to be!).

Next week will be extra busy.  I have three separate extra commitments that will keep me hopping and neglecting my site work.  Such is life.  And so, it goes.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 13FEB2025 – $1T

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Talcove from LexisNexis Special Services testifying before the DOGE committee yesterday:

“What amount of fraud can be prevented in the entitlements programs and how?”

“By putting identity confirmation requirements in at the front end of payment systems, eliminating self-certification, and monitoring the back end – $1T.”

A trillion dollars sounds like a good start on cutting the budget.

 

 

Update:

Comment by TomD

Yeah, 1 $trillion as in 10^12th power, is a start. You want to see the logical conclusion of this process?

This is the largest real bill printed in the history of man. When I got the bill, the value was approx. 1/10th the value of the paper that it is printed on. Ironically, due to now scarcity, the bills are selling for well over $100 on ebay. I’m pissed, I bought 20 of them for $1 each and was giving them away as jokes/object lessons.

100-trillion-zimbabwe-front

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.”