Tag Archives: spending

Detention Beds?

Posted on by
Reply

ICE thinks that, were the Laken Riley Act, which mandates immediate detention pending deportation of illegal aliens who have been arrested for theft of one sort or another, to be enacted, they would need, among other things, an additional $3 billion due to the agency needing an additional 60,000 detention beds.

That cost is heavily impacted by the fanciness of the beds.

Sixty thousand army cots from a big-name store would cost just $8.7 million, assuming no discount for such a large buy.

Other cots are available through big-name general marketer Amazon.com for prices around $55 each, or $3.3 million, again assuming no large buy discount.

Military surplus cots can be had for as low as $31—$1.86 million for the 60,000.

A 50ftx100ft Quonset hut can be had for $29,000 in construction kit form that, when assembled, provides a complete, weather tight shelter. That hut could easily shelter 120 illegal aliens on those cots. That works out to some 500 huts for $14.5 million. Add porta-potty latrines and a couple of Quonset huts for food preparation and eating, and we’re bringing in the detention facilities for less than $20 million.

Of course, those numbers make no allowance for segregating the detainees by sex. Having male- and female-only huts, though, would add only trivially to the cost, and most of that increment would be in added personnel to enforce the segregation.

If those $3 billon really are committed, the remainder should be for personnel. At an estimated $80k salary plus $13k payroll tax per additional ICE, CBP, and ESO agent, those remaining $2.8 billion could hire 28,500 more.

Whether an additional 28,500 are needed or not, the larger point is that the money should go toward the men and women who put their lives on the line going after these thugs, and not in housing them in unneeded luxury.

Defund PBS and NPR

Posted on by
Reply

Howard Husock, of American Enterprise Institute, thinks that is a bad idea. Unfortunately, his argument for continuing to send taxpayer money to these entities is pie in the sky irrationality. He does acknowledge the deep progressive tilt of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, and his own abuse by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a Congressionally-created entity that partially funds PBS and operates NPR, when he was a member of CPB‘s board of directors over a pro-ideology diversity op-ed he’d written: CPB stripped [him] of [his] committee assignments and accused [him] of violating [his] fiduciary duties. Because thought diversity is intolerable.

Nonetheless, he wants our taxpayer money to continue flowing to this left-wing “public” company and its subordinate formations.

Were PBS and NPR (and, I say, CPB) successfully shorn of taxpayer funding, Husock worries that

liberal foundations—many of which already support NPR and individual PBS programs—will step in to keep NPR and PBS alive. The Ford, Gates, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Kellogg, MacArthur, Robert Wood Johnson, and Open Society foundations have been NPR financial supporters and could easily fill a funding gap or even donate directly to the CPB, a chartered nonprofit.

He didn’t recognize the so what in his own words. Those entities already financially support those left-wing outlets; it won’t matter that those entities, and others, would step in to fill the gap from the loss of taxpayer funding. It won’t matter because what those three outlets publish won’t change.

Husock had this rationalization, too:

There would be no more congressional hearings about NPR‘s ideological bias, as were held in May. But the imprimatur and implied government seal of approval—the “national public” branding—would remain.

The former is another so what. Congress doesn’t do anything about that naked bias other than waste time on public virtue-signaling—by both parties—hearings. The latter is a matter of messaging, something the Republicans are heroically bad at. The outlet, in fact, wouldn’t be public anymore because it wouldn’t be receiving public funds anymore.

Husock closed his fantasy with posits of what Congress should do instead of cutting off the taxpayer dollar spigot: emphasize the purpose of promoting local “journalism,” ban advertising for “causes,” make CPB board budgeting debates and decisions public.

See above regarding Congressional inaction. Ask also—which Husock did not ask—about definitions of such things as “cause” and “journalism.” Then ask—which Husock also did not ask—about enforcement mechanisms.

Skip over the messy pie in the sky time-wasters. Defund NPR, PBS, and CPB.

Another Misapprehension

Posted on by
Reply

Some tax cuts are better than others goes the headline, and that’s true enough. But then the newswriter wanders afield.

…extending the lower individual tax rates that expire after 2025—by far the largest component of any likely tax bill and the one that directly affects the most voters—would put more money in consumers’ pockets without driving a meaningful change in the economy’s long-run trajectory. There is broad bipartisan support for retaining those lower tax levels that Republicans created in 2017, but keeping individual tax rates in place is unlikely to change most people’s decisions about whether and how much to work.

It’s certainly true that not all tax cuts would change, or have any effect, on us taxpayers’ spending behavior. So what? Those favoring higher taxes have yet to articulate a coherent government need for the money, beyond expansive welfare payments and expansive welfare transfers to the States—all without any sort of work requirement.

At bottom, too, it’s our money, not government’s, and we should be the ones who decide how to spend it, or not. Nor do the taxers and government bureaucrats and politicians get to tell us how or whether to spend our money—not directly (that’s part of the intrusiveness of Obamacare that has yet to be corrected), and not indirectly by taxing us and spending our money in government’s name. We’ll allocate our money to our financial needs and desires far more efficiently and with far more specificity than government can ever be capable of.

Full stop.

A Cost of Government

Posted on by
Reply

The Congressional Budget Office is saying that the Progressive-Democrat Biden-Harris administration’s Medicare prescription drug scheme could cost taxpayers more than $20 billion over three years.

The budget analysis arm of Congress said the increased costs are due to the government subsidizing many seniors’ premiums by sending money to insurance firms, and it would cost at least $5 billion extra in 2025 alone and add to the deficit.

If the administration really wants to spend our tax remittals on subsidies for seniors’ prescription drugs, it would be orders of magnitude more efficient to send those subsidy dollars directly to the seniors and let each individual senior use the money for his own particular medicine needs.

That’s anathema, though, to Progressive-Democratic Party politicians. That would put the decision-making, the responsibility, in the hands of us average Americans as individuals, in the hands of individual geezers in the particular case. Party doesn’t think we’re capable of making our own decisions, though. Party insists that only its members who are in government are capable of such decision-making; the rest of us really need to just sit down and do as we’re told. And experience the joy of that.

A Misapprehension

Posted on by
Reply

This one is, surprisingly, on the part of The Wall Street Journal‘s editors. In an otherwise cogent editorial with several sound points regarding former President and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s offers of specially targeted tax cuts, the editors closed with this mistake:

Mr Trump is now proposing to narrow the base, so [tax] rates will have to be higher.

Not at all. Alternatively, and far more optimally, with a narrower tax base, spending will have to be lower. That’s universal, too. With reduced (tax) revenues for any reason, spending would need to be lower. With current government spending, in fact, even with flat revenues, spending badly wants reduction.

It seems the august editors have lost sight of the cause of our nation’s deficits and debt, the cause extant throughout our history.