I’m all broken up about ‘draconian’ cuts hitting the federal government

By David McElroy · March 1, 2013

I just read the the Navy’s Blue Angels are going to cancel their flying shows this year because of budget cuts. I’m really upset about this.

If there’s no budget deal by midnight tonight, about $85 billion in budget cuts will kick in. For weeks, I’ve been bombarded with stories about how “draconian” these cuts will be. Even though everybody has known for months that the cuts are coming, Barack Obama and congressional Republicans act like teen-agers in cars playing chicken near a cliff.

Even though Obama gets to decide what cuts are made, he calls them “dumb, arbitrary cuts” that are “unnecessary and inexcusable.”

For instance, Joe Biden isn’t going to be able to fly home on the weekends aboard his Air Force jet. Instead, he’s going to have to go back to riding an Amtrak train. This is horrible. It’s upsetting. How could we let such a thing happen?

Various federal agencies are telling their employees that they’ll be taking one unpaid day off every week through the end of the year unless a budget deal is reached. (The IRS is delaying this particular cut until after tax season, so you can tell what their priorities are.) How will we possibly survive with a 20 percent reduction in the hours worked by these various bureaucrats? It’s outrageous that they won’t be in their offices doing … well, whatever it is that they do.

The White House wants to apply maximum pressure on Congress to keep spending, so it has released a list of what cuts will hit each and every state. Here’s the list of cuts that I’m supposed to be scared about here in Alabama, for instance. And I am. I’m terrified.

The administration has planned the cuts in such a way that all sorts of groups are terrified of losing their money. For instance, various science projects won’t get the money they’ve expected under the cuts. This is obviously the end of civilization. We’re entering the Dark Ages if the feds trim the amount of money they’re handing out.

We could go on and on. Inspections for food safety will be cut. Children aren’t going to get various vaccines. Meals programs for seniors and children face cuts. And on and on and on. The world is coming to an end. I’m terrified.

Well, not really. The truth is that these “draconian” cuts are only 3 percent of the federal budget. Some of the specific cuts are going to hurt real people, and that’s regrettable. But let’s be honest. They’ve been selected by the administration to create the most pain for the most people, in order to create a public cry for more spending.

Until midnight tonight, it’s possible that Obama and the Republicans are going to hit upon some deal to avoid this minuscule cut. Doesn’t it tell you all you need to know about the sick culture of Washington politics and media that a simple cut of 3 percent could be considered this terrible?

There are millions of people in this country who would be thrilled if their income had only been cut by 3 percent in recent years. Somehow, they’re making do and cutting back even with cuts much more than that. The dysfunctional federal government is a huge cash-sucking machine. The establishment is terrified of the idea of losing any of that cash.

The particular cuts that are happening might not be the right ones to start with in all cases. Technocrats can reasonably argue about that. Honestly, though, I couldn’t care less about their arguments.

All I know is that cuts of much, much more are needed. Most of what the federal government does today isn’t even constitutional, if you read the text of the document as intended. Even if we simply returned to the “era of big government” in the ’60s and ’70s, the size of government would have to dramatically shrink to get back to that. If you’ve been convinced that the current tiny cuts are going to fix anything or amount to much, take a look at what the federal budget will be over the next 10 years, with and without these cuts.

Politicians aren’t going to come up with any nice, neat little plan to start trimming government in an orderly fashion. They claim that this 3 percent cut is a draconian cut that uses a meat cleaver.

That’s not true, but let’s pretend it is. Let’s pray that the politicians don’t make a deal tonight. Let’s hope that truly draconian cuts can start. They’ll be painful, but real, sustained cuts — more and more of them — are the only way out of this fiscal nightmare.

Let the draconian cuts begin.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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