Tag Archives: spending

Furloughs and Redundancy

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If the government is partially shut down by Progressive-Democratic Party Congressional politician obstructionism, millions of federal employees could face furloughs, some federal offices may close or work shortened hours.

Those furloughs and closures would give us some interesting data on the usefulness/criticality of those furloughees and offices. Here’s what Slate found regarding these items during the Obama “shutdown” some 10 years ago:

Notice a couple of things here regarding Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s threat to stop paying our military members and Party politicians’ threats regarding the VA (right click on the graph and select Open Image in New Tab to get a bigger image). One is the Veterans Affairs level of furloughing: all of 4%. That’s not importantly different from the ordinary absentee rate due to illness, vacation, and so on.

Then look at the Defense line and the Note at the bottom of the graph, the latter which says Department of Defense total includes military personnel. Half of civilian personnel have been furloughed. The civilian furlough rate of 50% is a strong indication of how many of those civilians really are needed in the Pentagon and elsewhere in DoD. The military side of DoD can easily continue being paid out of current tax law-driven revenues flowing in to the government.

Finally, notice the furlough rate at so many of those Federal Agencies. That’s also a very strong indication of how many employees are truly unnecessary. Certainly, short-term furloughs overstate the degree of redundancy, but they give a very good index into how many truly are excess.

Who Restricts What in K-12 Education?

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Cogently put by Keri Ingraham, Discovery Institute’s American Center for Transforming Education Director in her Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

[M]ost “public” schools aren’t public at all.
In most communities, children are restricted to a single assigned school based on their home address and arbitrary boundary lines. Private schools often have academic, behavioral or other admissions standards, but they don’t keep children out simply based on where they live.

There’s this bit, too:

The cost of tuition is the primary barrier to parents who want to enroll their children. Nine states—Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia—have enacted universal or near-universal school choice into law, thus the financial barrier for families to enroll their children in private schooling—whether traditional, online, hybrid or micro schools—is crumbling.

But the Left and their teacher unions coterie object to lowering those cost barriers, which would free children from the chain link fencing around cheap, but badly ineffective, public schools. It’s those schools with their heretofore captive populations, after all, where the unions hold sway and collect their vig.

The Left and those unions bleat about how a child’s education ought not be based on the child’s family’s ZIP code.

Yet here they are.

A Step toward Downsizing the Federal Government

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Rightsizing is what the cool kids call it in their desperation to avoid notice, but what the House’s Republican Party’s Freedom Caucus is proposing represents a small, but needed, initial step toward downsizing our bloated Federal bureaucracy. Some of the State Department cuts being proposed include

  • State’s US Agency for Global Media would be reduced from $798 million to $734 million
  • State’s Democracy Fund and the United States Agency for International Development would be reduced from $355.7 million to $227.2 million
  • State’s US Global Health Programs would be reduced from $6.3 billion to $5.7 billion
  • State’s Global Environment Facility would be eliminated altogether, cutting $139.5 million

And so on.

In absolute terms, these are, individually, chump change cuts, for all that they represent significant reductions in each agency’s budget. They do, however, add up to $1.2 billion, including other State cuts not listed here, and so are an initial cut of 2% of the $58.5 billion 2022 State budget.

Over at the Energy Department, the Freedom Caucus is proposing elimination of the Aquatic Decarbonization and the Algae-Related Bioenergy Technologies, cutting $80 million from Energy’s 2023 $149 billion budget.

Freedom Caucus is proposing similar reductions for Agriculture.

I don’t often agree with the Freedom Caucus’ “my way or nothing” approach, but on matters regarding our nation’s morbidly obese Federal spending (and a deficit of $1.62 trillion just in the first 10 months of this fiscal year) and our resulting even more dangerously fat national debt, the Republican Party as a whole needs to stand tall on actual cuts.

Even if it means shutting down (some of) the Federal government next fall and winter. And spring. And summer. That, in itself, would result in badly needed spending cuts.

Another Government Shutdown?

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That’s what the Progressive-Democratic Party Representatives and Senators are threatening if they can’t continue their spendthrift ways in the upcoming budget negotiations.

[House] appropriators are expected to propose federal spending levels lower than the threshold in the Biden-McCarthy deal….

Two things about this: the spending level limit agreed in the debt limit deal is a ceiling, not a floor; it’s entirely legitimate for any budget to come in with even lower spending. The other thing is that cuts in spending (not merely reductions in spending growth) are critical to our nation’s weal.

Nevertheless, the Progressive-Democrats are playing their threats and lies game. House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D, CT) has made Party’s threats explicit:

This moves us in the direction of, you could say a CR [continuing resolution], but in October, we’re looking toward a shutdown[.]

Nice little government you got here, says the Congresswoman, be too bad if somethin’ was to happen to it.

HAC member Pete Aguilar (D, CA) demonstrated Party’s lack of integrity:

This is an agreement that the speaker made directly, and he took pains—remember?—to get everybody else out of the room and to get to a deal with just him and the president. And now he’s walking away from that deal[.]

Aguilar is lying. There’s no other way to put a claim that a budget proposal that’s entirely within the limit agreed in the debt ceiling deal breaks that deal. His claim is cynically and deliberately false. Then he assured us that the [Progressive-]Democratic-led Senate would ignore any appropriations bills that come[s] in under the caps set in the debt limit agreement.

The Progressive-Democrats want to shut down our government if they can’t have their way? I’m down with that.

Obfuscation through Mislabeling

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In New York, it’s being done cynically and deliberately in order to funnel American taxpayer dollars to illegal aliens.

The New York Senate has approved a controversial plan to divert federal money to provide low-cost health care coverage for “undocumented individuals.”

They aren’t undocumented individuals; they’re illegal aliens.

A legislative memo describing the bill cited by the New York Post reads

The lack of coverage for significant numbers of New Yorkers….

They aren’t New Yorkers; they’re illegal aliens.

Even Just the News (first link above) the past year….

No. They might—might—have been migrants when they left their home nation, but when they crossed our border illegally, they became illegal aliens, and they remain illegal aliens on their arrival in New York.

And again Just the News‘ mis-appellation, this time in summarizing the bill supporters’ claims:

…more than 400,000 immigrants don’t qualify for coverage options or public coverage through the New York State of Health Marketplace because of their immigration status.

They don’t qualify because their “immigration status” clearly demonstrates that they aren’t immigrants; they’re illegal aliens.

New York’s State Senate Republicans argue, correctly, that (paraphrased by Just the News)

the state should focus on caring for people living in the US legally.

Indeed. American taxpayer money should be committed, first and foremost, to supporting American citizens, whether native born or immigrant, and to supporting legal aliens, resident aliens present in our nation legally.

That’s made a whole lot harder to achieve when the illegal aliens are mischaracterized.