"The reason why I advocate across the board cuts is because there will be no room for any political maneuvering."
The problem with across the board cuts is that when you have areas that are understaffed and/or underbudgeted in the first place, then they effectively shut down. So you loose functionality and waste even more money. That happened here in 2004, the state legislature spent all their time on DeLay's redistricting and ran out of time to do their real job, which is the state budget. So they did a blanket, across the board cut to balance the budget and then went home. Given that the state still hadn't recovered from Bush's tax cuts before he ran for president in 2000, many state agencies effectively shut down. Hours were cut, paperwork for permits slowed to a crawl, the university system had to jack up fees. And it isn't like Texas is big on state services, we rank something like 44th.
We have a similar situation on the federal level. Most of the money has been shifted to a few favored departments. Those departments charged with oversight have had the biggest cuts. So across the board means that there would be even less oversight and departments like Homeland Security would be wasting even more money than they are now.
"LOL, the bubble was bursting well before the hanging chads were counted in Florida."
Go ahead and laugh. Sure, the budget would have suffered. But if there had been a commitment to balancing the budget during that time, it would have gotten back on track in a year or two. But between the tax cuts, unrestrained earmarks and the desire to expand the government under the truly stupid theory that deficits don't matter, there was no chance. Cheney and others publicly proclaimed that because they won the election they had the right to reward themselves. And they did, but at our expense. So we have had 6 years of looting the country. It has to stop.
"Besides, if you actually want to be honest about Social Security, you'd realize that you never had a surplus in the first place."
I didn't say there was a surplus, so I don't have a clue what you are talking about. Straw man time I guess. Social Security is a problem that needs to be dealt with. But it is far from the only problem. |
