Big Gov't? It's what you cut

[wakeflood]

Carly Fiorina was on Bill Maher last week. Heard her note that unlike Corporate America, government just keeps growing and growing. Departmental budgets grow every year, nothing gets shut down, etc.

Now, I don’t argue the fact that some government pruning and sunsetting of projects/sub-departments, etc. could and should happen.

But I have two issues with her statement.

First: Government employment fell significantly both in state and federal levels during this recession. Many, many thousands of people were let go both in DC and virtually every state. So, it’s not true that government doesn’t occasionally reduce in size (might have happened during Clinton as well?).

Second: And here’s the big conundrum. It’s not the idea of pruning, it’s what do you prune? The Right fought hard to keep $Billions in the new budget for unnecessary and redundant military programs (while letting the actual servicemen/women get the shaft). Wouldn’t it have been better for the country to ditch a few military boondoggles and instead invest in civil infrastructure? Apparently not because it didn’t make the cut in negotiations. Care to guess who stomped that out?

Did we need a WHOLE NOTHER cabinet level Homeland Security Dept. that has no sunset? How many overlapping security agencies do we have and we needed more? Wasn’t the whole problem on 9/11 siloing between entities? Which president signed off on creating that redundant cluster of a bureaucracy?

The point being, as always, just because the two sides agree on the concept, it doesn’t mean the execution is a slam dunk.

And if you think the GOP stands for smaller gov’t, you need to find another party.

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[miws]

And they are so adamantly against welfare.

Unless, of course, that welfare is going to people that have some variation of “Corp” in their last name.

Mike

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