There may come a day when I decide to shut down my social media (including this blog) because it’s consuming an increasing amount of time (which I can’t truly spare) and not really delivering results (i.e. readers, true connection to other human beings, or general satisfaction).
Until that time, however, I will continue to promote my own writing here and also occasionally opinionate. Today’s post is in the latter category.
Afterthoughts on Government
I’ll stand by my statement that Project 2025 is not a good-faith effort to present a plan to reform the structure or spending patterns of the federal government, and that it is instead a far-right conservative manifesto dedicated to inserting evangelical Christian interests at every level of government, due to an underlying belief that the US is a Christian nation.
Well, it isn’t. The founding fathers didn’t want that, or they wouldn’t have written the First Amendment, without which our Constitution would never have been ratified.
What the US is, is a cobbled-together federation of fifty states and several territories, each of which have their own interests and agendas but have agreed – by ratifying the Constitution – to work together as a single nation. Certain governmental functions are, by nature, best accomplished by a national government, rather than 50+ separate, smaller ones.
In order to truly reform the federal government, people need to accept several basic facts.
The US government spent 38% more than it collected in 2023. Deficit spending puts us, the states and citizens, collectively at risk because debt is leverage. We can achieve measurable savings by restructuring, streamlining, or eliminating various federal programs, agencies, or departments in the bottom quartile of spending (the VA, Agriculture, Education, personnel, civil defense, the DHS, and all the little offices). I’ll post about that pretty soon.
But if we truly want to eliminate the deficit, we have to start at the top (Department of Health and Human Services – 28%; Social Security Administration – 21%; Treasury – 16%; and Defense (Military programs) – 14% of total spending).
Fact 1: you cannot cut your budget by more than a third if you refuse to touch the departments spending three quarters of your money.
If you look at spending by category, vs agency, we see that Social Security takes 20% of our money; Medicare, 16%; Defense, 14%; Health, 13%; interest on the national debt (currently $33.2 trillion), 13%; and income security, 9%. The next category, 6% of spending, is veterans benefits and services - which might benefit from an audit, but I strongly doubt any citizen truly wants to reduce this category. As we reduce the size of our military (and we should) and as separated servicemembers die off (rude but true), the cost of veterans’ benefits will naturally fall.
The bottom line, I think, for those of us who are actually interested in reducing the size of the federal government, is that only those functions that must be national should be.
Thus,
Fact 2: we need to agree on the functions that only the federal government is equipped to handle. I already posted about my Top Ten.
And
Fact 3: we need to accept that the only manageable government is a limited government. We can’t keep adding new programs, agencies, or departments on top of the gappy, unstable, Jenga-like structure we have. We need to do a complete read-through edit of this bitch, red pen in hand.
Finally,
Fact 4: every US state and territory has its own government. Each state government is already tasked with functions that directly address citizen needs. To the extent that any functions of the federal government duplicate those of state governments, the federal agencies concerned need to go. We don’t need 50 separate state departments of education, transportation, income support, or housing and federal departments for the same.
Here's the short version. Federal-level laws and regulations: yes. Federal-level administration of every damn thing: no.
To my complete lack of surprise, the big swinging dick of “government efficiency” has walked back his claim that he could cut so much from the Federal budget.
It can be done, y’all. It’ll just really, really hurt. I have some follow-up in the pipeline about all that. Till now, the world is literally on fire, so I’m hunkering down to read a romance.