Cuts, Cuts, Cuts!

I had some ideas for budget reforms.  What do you think?

• End all wars and military operations in the Middle East, Asia (Korea, Japan, etc), Europe (Germany, France, Poland, Italy, etc), Africa, and South America. Permanently shutter all bases in same countries - return equipment to the USL48, and sell bases to those countries. Cancel all contracts for new weapons programs. Replace them with maintenance programs for existing equipment. (Save $500-600B+/yr)
• End all foreign aid. (Save $50-60B/yr)
• End all energy, agriculture (sugar, corn, etc), military-industrial, prison-industrial and big-pharma subsidies. (Save $37-40B/yr)
• Abolish the TSA, FDA, ATF, DEA, EPA, FCC, FTC, DOE (edu), HUD, FHA, Fannie and Freddie and all rules and regulations created by those departments or by the executive branch in the name of those departments. (Save $190.5-200B/yr)
• Abolish the US Postal service - or spin it off completely. No subsidies. (Save $12-15B/yr)
• End the drug war. (Save $15-20B/yr)
• Leave the UN and NATO. (Save $0.5-1B/yr)
• All other department budgets frozen - all increases cancelled, all federal wage hikes cancelled.

That's $805-931B in cuts right there. Now if the decrease in regulations encourages businesses to start up or expand, then the economy may pick up and federal revenues could go past the highs of 2007, maybe to $2.7 or $2.8 trillion. That is a lot of money, but even with that and all of the cuts, we'd still be something like $200B in the hole every year.

Can we do better than that?  Well I have another idea.  The federal government employs 2.1 million civilian workers.1 Total wages and benefits paid to executive branch civilians amounted to $236 billion in 2011.2  Thus the average annual compensation for a federal employee is $112,381.  Let's knock that down to the median US household income of $50,000,3 and eliminate all benefits (no healthcare, no retirement). 

That comes out to about $130B, but since I've already cut 21 percent of the government above, let's reduce these savings by 21 percent to account for that.  This knocks a further $103B off of our annual deficit, and should heavily reduce the number of career politicians and bureaucrats too.

Cutting $908-$1034 out of the budget, our deficit could go down to around $100B.  Not a bad start!

Sources:

1. Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2012, Analytical Perspectives (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2011), p. 110. Excludes the U.S. Postal Service
2. Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2012, Analytical Perspectives (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2011), p. 112. Excludes the U.S. Postal Service.
3. 691 - Money Income of Households--Median Income by Race and Hispanic Origin in Current and Constant (2009) Dollars

More reading:

• http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/overpaid-federal-workers

The National Debt and Generational Responsibility

I've been thinking about the national debt.  It occurs to me that each time we increase the limit, we are borrowing that money from some future generation, saddling them with our problems.  I came up with a rough solution to this travesty.

We could implement a constitutional amendment does the following:

Any increase in the national debt limit is hereby tied to a flat increase in all brackets of the income tax. 

1. This increase in taxes is the rate at which the increase in the national debt will be paid off in 4 years.
2. This new tax revenue cannot be used for any other spending or appropriation - the funds may not be raided by any agency, and must be used to pay down the debt.

An amendment such as this would ensure that any new debt added must accompanied by a tax that is paid towards the debt every year.  This ensures each generation pays for its own borrowing rather than kicking the can to their children or grand children.

Not that I like taxes, but at least if they were constituionally tethered there would be a "built in plan" to prevent the national debt from getting out of control.  I am not silly enough to think this payment guaranty would work - I am sure that politicians will screw it up - however this would ensure every American would feel the bite of borrowing, and my guess is that they would be up in arms about it. Maybe, just maybe, this would keep down the excessive borrowing and spending.

Again, this is very rough, but I am happy to hear your thoughts.

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

- Thomas Jefferson

The looming police state

A police state does not come on all at once.  It is a creeping menace, quietly approaching from behind a veil of obfuscation.

The early warnings by those observant few are always ridiculed.  Never mind the soldiers training to occupy and suppress US cities.  Ignore the tanks, drones and other weapons being delivered to your local law enforcement.  And the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has ordered 450 million rounds of .40 cal ammo for local use? Bah, don't give it a second thought.

It can't happen here, after all.

Antioch must have a lot more vegetation than Los Angeles, I am sure these uniforms will blend in nicely!

 Charlston's Police force has an ATV!  Fun for the summer!

In North Texas, they don't fuck around.

 I thought Phoenix was a much more laid back city though.

The Ventura Police have a "rescue vehicle."

 The Tampa Police force got one too!

Here comes the Montgomery County, Texas Swat team.  They're going to rescue the shit out of you.

 

The G-20 summit in Pittsburg. Children frighten politicians, I guess.

This is the Navistar 7000. It is designed to carry prisoners and equipped with benches and enclosed in a heavy wire mesh.  It has been showing up in increasing numbers throughout the country. 

When they come for us I won't bother to say, "I told you so," but I may just punch you in the face.

Liberty, Law, Government

Liberty is most simply defined as the freedom to do as one pleases - it is the freedom to think or act without being constrained by necessity or external force.  Liberty is among the most fundamental concepts of human life: that the individual has both the ability and the right to exercise his or her own free will, to make choices for himself or herself, and to act on them, without interference by others.

Why is there such a thing as liberty?  Why does an individual have this ability and right?  The answer is self ownership.  This is your life - it does not and cannot belong to anyone else.  These are your thoughts - they arise from your consciousness in the privacy of your mind.  This is your productivity - those things that you create belong to you.  You own yourself, and because of this you own your decisions and the results of those decisions - your successes, and also sometimes your failures.  When you own something, you have control over it, whether it is physical or conceptual.  Your ownership of yourself gives you both the ability and the right.  Life itself yields this self ownership from which liberty flows.

Individual liberty is virtually without limit - the only natural and correct constraint on individual liberty are those activities which interfere with the liberty of other individuals.  In other words, you are free to do as you please, unless the action impedes another individual from doing has he or she pleases.  This is the true meaning of Law.  It is simply the codification of the above principle - your actions cannot diminish the liberty of others.

What is law? What ought it to be? What is its domain? What are its limits? Where, in fact, does the prerogative of the legislator stop?
I have no hesitation in answering, Law is common force organized to prevent injustice; — in short, Law is Justice.
- Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

So we see that Law is the intentional and cooperative creation of individuals whose sole purpose is the protection of their individual liberty.  It would seem the very meaning of Law provides a litmus test for the actions of any body of men who assert their authority over others.  Unfortunately, it is clear that the majority of the men and women running the government of the United States have resoundingly failed this litmus test.

These men and women claim to implement the Law, but in reality they have really implemented something entirely different, a monopoly of force whose purpose is the exact opposite of Law.  With heavy reliance on this monopoly of force, government seems now to exist solely to coerce individuals, to reduce their liberty, and to expand its own size and powers.  Government force is used to suppress dissent and crush individualism, and is often used at the behest of corporations in order to destroy competition. Yet people go on believing that government is there to protect them and that it is right and just for the government to have this monopoly of force.

It is startlingly easy to prove that this is bald faced hypocrisy.  Consider the rights of individuals.  If an individual does not have the right to commit violence against another individual, then a group, which is simply a several individuals gathered with common purpose, does not have the right to commit violence against an individual either.  Since neither an individual nor a group has the right to commit this violence, then of course neither can they delegate this right to another group, not even one calling itself "government".  A group, no matter is size or self described importance, can have no rights that an individual does not have, because rights belong to individuals.  That is the hypocrisy of the government monopoly of force.

One can see why prominent thinkers believed in and created a small government here in the United States - they knew there needs must be some kind of framework to implement the Law, but that any such framework could quickly get out of control.

The best government is that which governs least.
- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Big bad oil industry

Two charts for your perusal, I will write something later. All data from EIA.

The first chart show the price of oil from 1986 to 2012, and the price of gasoline in New York and Los Angeles tracking the oil price quite well.  Layered on top are the two major wars we are involved in over there in the Middle East and the "great recession," that the government tells us has already ended.

The second chart shows the price of gasoline as a fraction of the price of crude oil and the trend - as you can see gasoline is actually getting cheaper compared to crude.

Here is the world oil production, and OPEC production, from 2001 on.  As you can see by 2005 OPEC and world production each increased by about 10% over the 2001 levels.

Iran - nuclear tyrant?

The media elites and the war profiteers in government are practically foaming at the mouth over Iran's nuclear weapons program.  No doubt you've heard it, but is there any truth to it?  Are there dissenting opinions?

It turns out there are dissenting opinions, and the people who are stating them might surprise you:

• General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "[...] we are of the opinion that the Iranian regime is a rational actor. ... The Iranian regime has not decided to weaponize their nuclear capability"
• Leon Panetta, United States Secretary of Defense: "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No."
• Intelligence community: U.S. intelligence agencies don't believe Iran is actively trying to build an atomic bomb.
• International Atomic Energy Agency: "[There is] no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapon programme in Iran."

If you recall, there was a similar buildup 10 years ago when discussing Iraq - we were made to believe that they had a highly advanced nuclear weapons program and were bent on nuclear armageddon.  What did we find?  Zilch.  We left over four thousand of our soldiers dead in the sand, over what?  Lies, nothing more.  We put the blood covered profits in the hands of the military industrial complex and made the world less safe.

Read the Truth about War website to see, in hindsight, what we should have known all along.  We can and must learn from our mistakes, and the lesson we must learn is to always question authority.

Finally, watch the farewell address by President Eisenhower.

Do nearly half of American tax payers pay no income taxes?

An admittedly brief analysis allows me to draw the following conclusions.  The 2009 IRS numbers say that (after all deductions and credits):

The top 0.7% (<1 percent) of the tax payers are paying 29.8% of all income taxes. 
The top 3.78% of the tax payers are paying 47.8% of all income taxes. 
The top 16.8% of the tax payers are paying 72.5% of all income taxes. 
The top 27.8% of the tax payers are paying 81.2% of all income taxes. 
The top 45.7% of the tax payers are paying 91.8% of all income taxes. 
The top 55.9% of the tax payers are paying 94.7% of all income taxes. 

Examining the bottom 44.1% ...

The bottom 0.3% of the tax payers are paying 0.0026% of all income taxes. 
The bottom 2.6% of the tax payers are paying 0.0488% of all income taxes. 
The bottom 8.5% of the tax payers are paying 0.3% of all income taxes. 
The bottom 15.5% of the tax payers are paying 0.7% of all income taxes. 
The bottom 23.2% of the tax payers are paying 1.4% of all income taxes. 
The bottom 30.8% of the tax payers are paying 2.3% of all income taxes. 
The bottom 44.1% of the tax payers are paying 5.3% of all income taxes. 

So it appears that it's more accurate to say that nearly half of American tax payers are paying just 5% of the income tax.

Some more in depth reports indicate that the 47% no income tax is for "single filers," while my analysis was for all filers.  The claim is not totally accurate as represented, but it's not too far off - interpolating the last data from each group gives us about 50% of tax payers paying about 93% of all income tax.

Anyway, this is just something to think about, especially for people who are carrying around the idea that the wealthy aren't paying their fair share.  (Note that the top 16.8% might be considered wealthy as that includes all filers whose taxable income is above $100,000.)
Examine the data for yourself on the IRS website.
Table 1.4:  All Returns:  Sources of Income, Adjustments, and Tax Items
Table 3.3:  All Returns:  Tax Liability, Tax Credits, and Tax Payments