Noted economists Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, Jason Bonham, and Jimmy Page - The song remains the same . . .
By Robert Gore - December 21, 2024
[Part One of this series can be found on RMN here: https://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=249476 . . . SC]
All eyes are on Trump and team, and that’s the problem. The government is the star around which everything else orbits. In the U.S., as in the rest of the world, government is the dominant fixture in the lives of those who must live under it. Trump promises to Make America Great Again. Effective as that slogan has been, that’s all it is, an advertising bromide. Nations and other collectives are never great; once in a great while individuals are. The only role governments have in the quest for greatness is to stay out of the way of the individuals capable of achieving it.
Very little in Trump’s domestic program betrays any realization that government is the problem, not the solution. Some of the measures being bandied about scream: Be careful what you wish for! One proposal is to move 50,000 federal officials from the Civil Service to Schedule F, where they would essentially be political appointees serving at the sufferance of the president. For its proponents, the proposal will be a great idea right up until the next Democrat president is elected.
Another proposal is to move agencies away from Washington, supposedly to make them more responsive to the people for whom they nominally work. As an example, it’s been suggested that the Department of Energy—which ought to be abolished—should be moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico. The proponents of that one have obviously never been to tiny Los Alamos. (I grew up there.) Its overpaid (Los Alamos is one of the ten wealthiest areas in the U.S.), underachieving (what do they do with $5 billion a year?) scientists have driven up housing prices to Washington levels and have made Los Alamos the most liberal county in liberal New Mexico. Who would have thought that a town that owes its existence to the government consistently votes for more government?
Moving entire bureaucracies to the hinterlands will seed liberal enclaves, mini-Washingtons. Once they’re plopped in some place like Iowa or Montana, the locals and their businesses will quickly become addicted to government sugar and fight tooth and nail to keep it coming. Government money creates loyal Democrats among fifth-generation Americans just as readily as it does among illegal migrants. Keep the bureaucracies in one place, where they’re less likely to infect the rest of the country, and where they’re easier to target for elimination. Eliminating government waste has been a campaign pledge of candidates from both parties since the government’s massive expansion during Franklin Roosevelt’s reign. The ceaseless growth of the government has belied the promises; waste is more rampant than ever. Now it’s Vivek and Elon’s turn, and their paradoxical first order of business is yet another cabinet department, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Elon has said that he, Vivek, and DOGE’s cost-cutters can whack $2 trillion in spending. Lending superficial credibility to that claim is Elon’s dismissal of 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce after he bought it.
Imagine Day One at DOGE. “Right here,” a cost cutter excitedly exclaims, “Health and Human Services spent twenty dollars for a five-dollar stapler. That’s fifteen down, one trillion, nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five to go!” Unfortunately, a glance at a government spending pie chart blows that pledge and Elon’s claim out of the water. From the Congressional Budget Office, in Fiscal Year 2023, $3.8 trillion of the $6.1 trillion the government spent was mandatory spending, the largest components of which were Social Security ($1.3 trillion), Medicare ($839 billion), and Medicaid ($616 billion). Mandatory spending is mandated by law, and only rescission or amendment enacted by Congress and signed by the president can change the applicable law. The Constitution does not grant DOGE a role in that process.
Discretionary spending in FY 2023 was $1.7 trillion, of which $805 billion was for defense. For Trump, defense spending is sacrosanct, so no cuts there—spending will increase. Nondefense discretionary spending on a wide assortment of programs was $917 billion. While there are undoubtedly programs that could be eliminated and other savings realized within this category, it also includes things like veterans’ benefits, scientific research, and agricultural price supports. Cuts there would hit Trump constituencies. New spending to pay for deporting millions of illegal migrants would fall in this category as well.
A quarter of $2 trillion, $500 billion, would be an ambitious target for the DOGErs. Cynics (realists) will take the under. While the DOGErs will eliminate some regulatory weeds, that’s not going to propel nearly enough growth for the tax take to increase $1.5 trillion and make up the difference. And what happens to DOGE when Trump, Elon, and Vivek have moved on to other pursuits? If things run true to form, DOGE will grow. Every year its budget will increase, because by Washington logic, the only way to cut spending is to increase it.
Omitted from the above reckoning was net interest (interest the government pays out to the public minus the interest the government receives on debt it issued to itself), which was $659 billion in FY 2023 and $882 billion in FY 2024. That 33.84 percent increase is what happens when the debt curve inflects upward and interest rates rise. Gross annual interest already exceeds $1 trillion, behind only Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. By the end of Trump’s term, gross interest will probably be the largest item in the budget.
The national debt of $36 plus trillion is almost $107,000 per citizen and $271,000 plus per taxpayer (usdebtclock.org). Cue the ominous opening chords from the first 22 seconds of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” . . .
[SNIP]
