Keep DOGE and Carry On
Controlling spending is important, but reducing the scope of government that is causing it is even more so.
All Americans are angered in one way or the other about the spending revelations coming out of the DOGE activities.
Elon and his Muskrats are digging up simply stupefying things, ranging from a multitude of “sexpenditures” (such as contraception supplies, transgenderism related comic books and plays), to more serious sociopolitical engineering (climate justice “that flows through a free Palestine”, global censorship efforts and destabilization of foreign regimes) to the simply mind-blowing malfeasance of half a trillion dollars sent to expired programs, billions that were “lost”, and the Biden administration “parking” twenty billion or so in commercial banks so Trump theoretically couldn’t access it (to stop it since it was already out of government hands).
Some of us find it simply maddening to have our suspicions of inherent incompetence and irreparably broken systems confirmed in such stark relief. What systems were once assumed to effectively manage the money we are forced, under penalty of law, to send to the IRS, are now recognized as horrifically ineffective or in many cases, not even used.
There are others, people who do not share our skeptical approaches, who are angered we have the temerity to question the results of this broken process and through questioning, somehow impugn the reputations of people referred to in a recent NYT opinion piece by a cadre of former Treasury Secretaries as “a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants” the actions of whom have been “have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.” Never mind that these are the people who, based on factual evidence, have been dedicated solely to processing payments for decades without question or concern about where that money was going.
“I was just following orders” has about as much credibility now as it does every time commands and processes are prioritized over duty and common sense.
Stopping the mistakes (including the intentional ones), the waste, the fraud, and the abuse – and getting some sort of transparent accountability process in place is just a first step.
“Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should” is something that should always be considered any time an all-powerful (or near all-powerful) entity is involved – and while not truly all-powerful, the United States government gets about as close to that as we will ever know this side of Heaven.
No doubt the current debates and actions that are focused on controlling the flow of money are critically important to stop the bleeding, but the larger question we should be considering, is that of what in hell is our government doing spending our tax dollars for so many things that are simply beyond the scope of its powers as enumerated in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Milton Friedman used to say that cutting taxes would force governments to cut spending to make ends meet. In a rational world perhaps, but we left the rational world in the rearview twenty years ago. Standing here today, thirty-seven trillion dollars in debt, we have proved him wrong. Why cut spending when you can spend more, tax less and send the bill to our grandchildren?
For a smaller state, we need to cut spending as we cut taxes and avoid the temptation to fund the gaps with government borrowing. “Cutting spending” sounds good, but almost any big spending cut would leave a lot of people high and dry. To really choke off government spending, we need wholesale reprioritization and across the board cuts - but without a complete overhaul of policy in general, no real cuts can be made.
“Too big to fail” is often also too big to control and the path we are on today is unsustainable. I’m not economist, but I do not think the Democrat plan of “let’s just avert our eyes from DOGE and keep the party going” isn’t the right one.
We might have been given an opportunity to finally have enough popular support to put Pandora’s parade of horribles back in the box by confining government to much smaller, much more focused duties and responsibilities.
To your use of the key descriptor “incompetent”.
When the use of the words incompetent and incompetence exploded all across social media, including comments at YT channels in early 2021, I commenced repeatedly sharing the observation that,
“One person’s incompetent or incompetence may well be another’s espionage, sabotage or treason.”
Given the dizzyingly-large tidal wave of revelatory facts and numbers since then, but most especially the now blatantly obvious recurring theme, together establishing an indisputable pattern…
…my observation above which I’ve repeatedly shared since early 2021, now feels nothing less than prescient as if it was then, remains now and will forever be, the only truth.
In a Chapter 7 bankruptcy the Court allows the trustee to auction off all superfluous assets. I say AUCTION OFF THE US-HELD WESTERN LANDS minus the national jewels like Yellowstone and Yosemite Parks.
Dick Cheney, as VP and hatchet-man of George W. Bush, did all of us (as well as Blackrock) a great service by broadening the range of permissible government actions under the various Western Lands acts governing commercial exploitation of the U.S.-owned subterranean assets in the West. Soon the sparsely inhabited rangelands of Wyoming came to resemble the busier parts of the Arabian peninsula and adjacent Persian Gulf. This helped us attain energy independence before the Green Ghouls under the titular rule of Biden shut us down. There are all kinds of valuable resources lying unused in the West and North Slope of Alaska. And when this pays down the debt then fully refund Social Security and Medicare and cease those covert euthanasia protocols in our publicly funded hospitals!