Alert! A horrendous under-the-radar bill
| By aschill - Dec 20th, 2005 at 1:24 am EST |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
In the wee hours of yesterday morning (probably as I was finishing a paper), the House passed the budget reconciliation conference bill 1932. The bill includes crippling cuts in Medicaid, stricter demands on states to receive funding for TANF and child care, and cuts in child support enforcement. The vote was a characteristically close 212-206 (I get the sense that the conservative leadership likes to pass bills with pathetically small margins because they refuse to compromise on pieces that might get a broader consensus. Just to show they can.)
The bill is currently under debate in the Senate, so especially if you are from Ohio, Maine, Oregon, Minnesota, or Pennsylvania, call your senators and express your strongest possible objection to a bill that will result in further strain on the most vulnerable among us, especially children.
The bill is currently under debate in the Senate, so especially if you are from Ohio, Maine, Oregon, Minnesota, or Pennsylvania, call your senators and express your strongest possible objection to a bill that will result in further strain on the most vulnerable among us, especially children.
!
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1. What, specifically, are the cuts? The items you named sound interesting, but are very general.
2. Assuming we don't want to keep expanding the budget deficit, what's the Democrat's counter-proposal for where the domestic spending cuts should come from?
3. About the above: Cuts have to come somewhere, because even rolling back the Bush tax cuts and even raising taxes on top of that wouldn't be enough to cover it. Democrats have been turning to the Bush tax cuts as a panacea, a cure-all, their response for how they'd pay for anything they want to do. The tax cuts did not cost us an infinite amount of money, and the totality of the Democratic agenda as it currently stands would cost far, far more than anything we can salvage on the taxation end. So in the domestic budget, where do the cuts come?
Corporate welfare:
Is it good business to invest in a failing company? Of course not, but our government does it constantly in the name of saving jobs. That is why we need to invest in more modern, sustainable industries that will carry us into the future. The most important of which is hemp. Link
Industry subsidies:
The dairy industry writes off 1/3 of its advertising budget, which has significantly increased in the past several years. The dairy industry is losing its market control to soy, rice and other alternative, animal-free milks as people become aware of milk's horrible health implications.
Link
http://www.notmilk.com/
No-bid contracts:
Whenever the government must contract out work to the private sector, this should involve the same practices a corporation would employ. This should involve corporate bidders making presentations to decision-makers in a public forum. No more $600 lamps at the Pentagon.
Social programs are what taxes should be spent on. Yes, we need a large military budget; the military is a common good that provides for our mutual protection. The remaining government budget should be used to invest in our future. Taxes are investments that buy roads and national parks, our childrens' education, the American Medical Association, and the multitude of similar social programs that represent America's greatness. Taxes should not be an afliction that anyone needs relief from. There was a time when it was an honor to pitch in for the common good of your nation; now all you have to do is buy a "Support the troops" ribbon.
I propose a new tax system:
America will have different levels of "membership." All who contribute are "members"/citizens.
Contributions are public knowledge.
Those who are strong contributors will be honored for their amazing benefit to society.
I think this is at least a good start at how to "internalize" the costs that so many corporations currently prefer to "externalize" onto society.
1. I agree, 'corporate welfare' is bad. That said, you're being indiscriminate between what constitutes true rent-seeking behavior (i.e. corporate welfare) and genuine subsidization of positive externalities (i.e. the proper governmental role in a free-market economy). This has been the subject of much gnashing of teeth among Ph.D economists, and you do not want to toss the baby out with the bathwater; nobody so far seems to have come up with a good and practical way to differentiate between the good and the bad.
You're making something sound easy when in the real world, it plainly isn't.
On top of that: Cutting corporate welfare alone is not nearly enough to cover the kind of spending the overall Democratic platform is calling for.
2. Involving no-bid contracts: Many of them are bad, and should be looked at. However, they do involve a savings in time and a savings in the cost of bidding that oftentimes necessitates the practice. So, assuming government functions properly, you'll never see a world without no-bid contracts at all. Furthermore, many no-bid contracts are not the free lunch for industry that is often assumed; to pick everyone's favorite boogeyman, after risk premiums are accounted for Halliburton is turning a pitifully small profit on their Iraq War no-bid contracts. Cutting the genuine waste from the no-bid contracts would not take a significant chunk out of the overall costs of the Democratic agenda.
Furthermore, many of the obscenely overpriced items are not the result of no-bid contracts, but the result of incompetent people handling the bidding. My father had to intervene at my elementary school when I was little, I remember, because clueless administrators negotiated a contract with Apple that gave Apple the exclusive right to supply them with mouse-pads at $5 a pop.
It's not as simple as just "running government like a business". A business is run the way it is due to a confluence of market forces and tensions. Nobody has yet found a workable way to make government run like a business.
3.