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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (422)	6/5/2005 5:33:20 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541354

There will be issues if we make any major changes in government, such as cutting 1/3rd, but I don't think its reasonable to expect that anyone will have all the answers about how people will cope and react. For many supporters of small government and strongly free markets one of the very reasons that they are against a large amount of government spending is that we can not predict the consequences of government decisions. If we leave it to people to make their own decisions they will know more about their own life than any government offical. Also if you leave it to individuals you increase liberty. Of course increasing liberty is an ideological goal, and you seem to be trying to avoid such goals. I'm not sure how that can work. Lets turn it around, was there any demand to know all the unexpected consequences and results of Social Security, Medicare, and thousands of other government programs before they where enacted? If you where there are the time would you have insisted that such questions had to be asked and answered before we could impliment the policy? Tim

To: Dale Baker who wrote (422)	6/6/2005 8:17:18 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541354

Cutting federal spending by 1/3 across the board would leave some major holes in a lot of programs I made this point before but I'll make it once more. I'm not focused on cutting the budget. That's a meat cleaver approach. I'm interested in reinventing how we do things. The result of that is most likely reduced cost, but it keeps the horse in front of the cart. The reduced cost is the byproduct, not the goal. There are lots of business tools for evaluating programs. A simple one is categorizing them by whether they're doing right things right, right things wrong, wrong things right, wrong things wrong. If they're deemed wrong, you stop doing them. If they're right/right, such as the federal court system, which you mentioned a couple of times, you keep doing them. If they're right/wrong, you find a better way to do them. An example of right/wrong, IMO, is federal flood insurance. Sure, flood insurance is a good idea. But why does Uncle Sam have to have to manage it? That's a classic example of the sort of thing the market can deal with. Now, I haven't studied this program and there may prove to be a good reason for the feds to manage this, but let's find out what it is before continuing it in perpetuity. what they would cut from today's budget, the impact it would have You're assuming that cutting something from the budget means that it doesn't get done and someone will suffer. That's the kind of assumption that polarization introduces into our thinking. If the thing gets done more efficiently and effectively, then that someone gets a benefit. There's nothing sacred about the feds doing it. Far from it. But I want those questions to be asked and answered before I accept a sweeping declaration about public policy. I don't think you can get there bottom up. You first have to be somewhat receptive to the concept. Then particulars can be analyzed and evaluated and you can see if you accept it or not.