Challenge: Cut The Budget

Here's the deal. We have the picture of the national budget. Pretend for a minute you have the ability to cut whatever you want, reorganize the remains, and want to keep the same intake so you can pay don the national debt. How much can you save?

Use the picture here: http://a.imagehost.org/view/0203/1209052844389.jpg

and itemize so everyone can see what you cut.

Starve children.

Kill old people.

Cut where appropriate to achieve those goals.

Done.

They posted the budget diagram, but I'm asking how much people could save and what they would cut. I working on my list and will turn it in after dinner.

From the top, going clockwise (this post will be edited so I don't have to find everything at once), everything listed gets 100% cut unless otherwise noted:

Department of Agriculture - all except the Forest Service, which only remains until the public lands are appropriately sold off. Savings: 51.431 billion until Forest Service rendered unnecessary, after that 55.558


Dept. of Commerce - not PTO and Census; NIST, ITA cut by 50%. Savings: 10.042 billion

Corps of Engineers - I'll come back to this one later.

Dept. of Education - all. Savings - 158.997 billion

Small Business Administration - all. Savings - 30.808 billion. Alternatively, I'd give them the option to incorporate as a wholly owned subsidiary of the FedGov, and they could continue operations unfunded, making unguaranteed loans at market rates. Any profit they make goes into the treasury.

Dept. of Energy - all except National Nuclear Safety Administration; nuclear waste disposal cut by 50%. Saving: 32.2255 billion.

EPA - all; offset by increasing prosecution for pollution of private property crimes by .5 billion. Savings: 13.816 billion.

DHS - DHS umbrella, TSA, FEMA. Restore other agencies to their previous statuses. Savings: 45.874 billion.

Department of Housing and Urban Development - all. Savings: 70.83 billion.

Going to stop here for now; can't figure out if the leaf circles are in addition to or are part of the branch circles; SBA says they're in addition, others appear to be as part of; but they don't add up precisely. If it's "as part of" for everything except the SBA, my savings numbers are roughly 2x too large. Anyone know how it's supposed to work?

^Yeah, but the bread riots will be cool.

Cut the entire Social Security program and Welfare.

All of it.

It wouldn't matter if I did, the government doesn't care what I think.

Honestly? The American people are so reliant on their government that you can't really remove all that much without upsetting the current order of things. While I'm sure many of you are more than happy to cause chaos and destruction to satiate your curiosity and convictions, I am not.

What we could do, however, is use prudence in our decisions. We are currently rebuilding New Orleans, a city collectively agreed upon as a drain of resources. We're building sandcastles in Iraq and sitting on the fence in Afghanistan. We throw money at our poor and impoverished, because our attention span is so short, and then blame them for being irresponsible and lazy. We're bailing out people and corporations because they lived beyond their means and gambled.

This nation needs a new direction, a national geist. We're so concerned with the short-term and personal gratification that we're condemning ourselves to historical irrelevancy.

Also, fuck you. I like my trees.

I'd almost completely eliminate military spending. The $500 billion or so would then be channeled into social programs.

You'd have a hard time maintaining those programs.

It is astounding to see what we clould save if tomorrow we stopped all spending on military endeavors and sold off all our hardware. I know we can't do that because of the position America has put itself in, but if we could conceiveably rid ourselves of a military.

Which just goes to show how horribly and orwellianly misnamed the "Department of Defense" is. We could immediately cut current military spending--current because interest on past payments can't be cut immediately--by 2/3 or more and still spend every penny that we currently spend on useful defense and on R&D useful for defense. Which isn't to say that the U.S. should cut all offensive military capability; we shouldn't. But what we have now is most emphatically not a Department of Defense, and a Department of Defense is exactly what we should have.

We should be out of Iraq post haste, and we need to severely rethink our anachronistic but still in effect cold-war strategic goals. We don't need the capability to fight two full scale foreign land wars at the same time; we don't need any further development of nuclear weapons capability; we don't need nearly the number and scale of fully manned and permanent foreign military bases that we have; we don't need to spend what money we do spend on offensive capabilities on developing the ability to penetrate deep into Soviet airspace; etc. We do need the ability to swiftly and simultaneously mobilize for multiple short term mixed ground/air campaigns; we need to dramatically improve our capabilities at peacekeeping; we desperately need to return Department of State functions to the Department of State and expunge Department of Defense functions from State; we need a constitutional ban on the hiring of mercenaries outside the chain of command; etc.

Mostly we need to acknowledge that we won the cold war and get over it already.

Works fine for some smaller countries, because they live under the protective blanket of more powerful allies.

But to get rid of the American military would endanger almost everyone in the free world, not just America.

Whatever.....

If by "social programs" you mean "back into the pockets of the people who earned that money" I agree 150%

That I can agree with. Goldwater-Nichols is turning into an abomination in my eyes.

To highlight this, I caught a glimpse of a Pentagon press conference a few days ago with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A reporter asked him if we would be attacking Iran.

The one, the only answer he should have to that question is, "That's a question for the President and State Department." Instead, he rambled on about CINCCENTCOM (excuse me, Combat Commander of the Central Command) was on a tour with various middle eastern government leaders.

Isn't that what we pay the Secretary of State to do? Isn't that why we have a Secretary of State?

Why do you think Bush put Condi in the State Dept? Problem with Powell is he actually wanted the State Dept to function. Condi has no problem with it being walked all over by Defense.

Then you're an idiot for wanting to keep the forest service around. No forest service means no renting unsustainable logging rights at below-market rates to loggers who don't have to give a damn about the quality of the forest, because they can wreck public lands consequence-free. But if those loggers are limited by the fact that they have to actually buy the land at auction, and can't overlog an area without requiring themselves to buy new, expensive land, their logging will become more sustainable. Simple economics.

We've designed it to do so. The world operates the way it does because (in theory) we're there to kick down your door and slit your throat.

That's not to say we should. Frankly, I'm ready to leave the Iraqis to their own devices and invade Waziristan. At the same time, I think we should open up dialogue with the Iranians and recall the legions from Korea so the PDRK can either put up or shut up.

tl;dr, I have no compunction about ruining the world, I just don't feel like destroying/rebuilding the dirt poor areas that will never trade with us. We still need camps for the legions as forward deployment areas, and we still need super secret bombers to ensure the complete destruction of the Russian countryside.

The Forest Service does more than rent parcels of our land. We're not turning over our natural resources to private entities, period.

I provided an answer a couple months ago.

http://www.wordforge.net/showpost.php?p=1466240&postcount=40

Yeah, but only the right ones.

As a percentage of our country's population, our military is rather small.