Timing is Everything

For those of you that have been keeping up with some of my earlier posts, you may have noticed my tentative approval of what the Tea Party movement as a whole stands for: fiscal responsibility.  However, the movement had yet to really offer up a clear idea of how they planned to accomplish said goal.  That is, until now.  A Mr. Phillip Dennis, founder of the Dallas Tea Party and a member of the Board of Directors, wrote a piece that CNN published last Friday that outlines what the Tea Party would like to see happen in order to meet their goals for fiscal responsibility.  Sadly, I find myself disappointed.  It would be wise of you to read the letter, found here before continuing, but I shall quote the parts I’m referring to as I speak about them.  As a whole I find the plan ill conceived given the economic hardships our country is facing, but let’s break it down further than that, analyzing each of the points he makes as a means to be fiscally responsible.  If you care little about the meat of it, skip to my conclusion at the bottom.

“Abolish the Departments of Education and Agriculture, and the EPA”:

Abolishing branches of the federal government is a pretty standard request as a means to cut costs, but let’s be realistic.  The DoE is the organization that, as any family with a child in college will tell you, offers out student loans.  Abolishing the DoE makes secondary education for 14 million American children much harder, and even primary education for another 56 million less fulfilling.  Only about four thousand people actually work for the DoE, so almost all of it’s money goes to building our children a better learning environment.  Abolishing it really only hurts them.

The Department of Agriculture probably sounds more familiar to people as the USDA.  The USDA, with a budget of about $100 billion a year, goes largely to three different things.  The largest is probably the food stamp program, which with our current economic and unemployment problems, is more important than ever.  Next up is a combination of rural development and foreign agriculture services.  These focus on American farmers, subsidizing and helping an already struggling industry pay for utilities and other costs, and then promoting their products on the foreign markets.  Killing this off hurts an industry already so close to collapse.  Third and finally are the 100,000+ employees that are currently employed with them.  Yeah, now’s a great time to be throwing an extra 100k into unemployment.

The EPA is a little trickier, as a lot of what they do falls into what the DEP could do instead.  Also for the sake of article length I’ll leave this one for now in that, again by abolishing the EPA, you throw another 17,000 people into unemployment.

“Repeal the Stimulus Bill and Government Pork Spending“:

Hoo boy where to start.  First off, a good portion of the stimulus money is already in the system, keeping (for now) 600,000 Americans employed.  If you were to cancel the projects and return what money you could, you just threw them all into unemployment.  Again, during a recession with record unemployment already.  On top of that, the Stimulus Bill offers over $500 BILLION in tax benefits and loans to American citizens and businesses.  If you want another phrase to use to describe this portion of the bill (most of it), think of it as an emergency tax cut.  You know, those things your movement is constantly asking for.

As for pork spending, how do you propose we repeal it?  Pork Spending isn’t something the federal government actively tries to do, it’s the state senators and representatives trying to help out their districts and states in projects that would otherwise be extremely difficult for the state to fund.  If you somehow managed to cut pork entirely from federal government, your state taxes would likely skyrocket.  Either way, if you want to cut pork, you are doing the correct thing in writing to your congressmen, but you should also speak to your neighbors and local governments about cutting back on funding requests to the feds.  The federal government isn’t just giving areas money because they feel like it, those areas are asking for it.

“Government Jobs should be substantially cut”:

The Federal Government is a truly massive machine, employing over 2 million Americans.  I approve of trying to trim jobs from this monster when it’s safe to, but SUBSTANTIALLY cutting jobs during a recession isn’t going to help anybody.  I don’t know how many you mean by substantially, but even 1% is 20,000 people.

“Fraud and Welfare Waste must be eliminated”:

I don’t think it’s feasible to eliminate it completely, but we can certainly try.  Ironically in order to do this, we would need to hire or divert federal employees and funding, two things that you’ve already stated you want to do away with.  On the bright side President Obama has already stated on several occasions that he aligns with you on this endeavor, so there’s that at least.  I don’t think there’s anyone in government that WANTS to waste money.

“Welfare and Unemployment Benefits must be drastically cut”:

Timing is everything on this one.  With 10.4% Unemployment, cutting off what help these people have would not help the system one bit.  I understand your concern that some people effectively live on government handouts, but we’re in a recession right now, it is pretty obvious to everyone that a majority of these people were laid off for reasons outside of their control.

“Welfare, Health, and Education services for illegal immigrants must be eliminated”:

As illegal immigrants are ineligible for welfare, I am happy to say you’re upset about nothing.  As for health services, illegal immigrants tend to overwhelmingly take advantage of clinics, as opposed to emergency rooms, which is where the serious costs come up.  Education is a touchier subject that is generally controlled by the state governments, so I’m not sure what you expect the Fed to do, especially if the only organization that COULD do anything, the Department of Education, gets removed like you want it to.

“The Center for Immigration Studies recently reported that 33 percent of immigrant households use some kind of “welfare.” Again, who pays? The American taxpayer!”

I’m intrigued how this statistic regarding legal immigrants within our country, is any sort of proof as to why we should eliminate the aforementioned systems for illegal immigrants.  After all, the 33% of immigrant households pay all the same taxes the rest of us do.

“Government must get completely out of the private sector…. Government control… is a sure recipe for disaster”:

If you look back in time you will find that history proves you wrong.  The Great Depression in the 1930’s was largely contributed to the complete lack of regulation of the financial market by Coolidge, leading to an overinflated market that eventually crashed back down to reality.  A prior depression in 1893 was caused by the unregulated railroad industry that caused unregulated banks to crash.  It has been found in Europe, and was generally agreed as the best solution to our current situation by Economists, that nationalizing the banks would significantly help with the current recession.  However that’s a bit too “socialistic” for some people, and so instead we set the market up to crash all over again.  Government control has proven to be the stabilizing factor that keeps the market in check enough that it doesn’t crash, and history is on my side.

My Conclusion:

Some of what you suggest has merit as a means to cut back on government spending.  However, with the economy as it is right now, it would be extremely reckless to implement said ideas.  You would be throwing a MINIMUM of 725 THOUSAND people into unemployment, and that’s not including ANY federal employees that you wish to substantially cut.  If we cut just 1%, we’re up to around 750k, or .2% MORE unemployment nationally.  This isn’t even taking into account the farmers and teachers that would lose their jobs due to the sudden inefficiency of their respective areas, or the children that can’t afford to further their educations.

Economists agree that the best way to get through a serious market crash is to artificially inflate the market until the real numbers can hold it up on their own.  In fact a large majority of Economists agree that the Stimulus package was the bare MINIMUM of what should be done.

So in the end, timing is everything.  If you want to push for changes in government spending, do it when the American people can afford said changes.  Watching that national debt clock slow down a little bit isn’t worth seeing our country plunge further into unemployment.  Jobs and aid to those that don’t have them are more important right now.

If anything, you should have been protesting during previous administrations that also invoked runaway spending, and they were during periods when unemployment was down and the market could have more easily dealt with your demands.  Granted, those presidents would be Ronald Reagan (1.7 trillion), George H W Bush (1.4 trillion), and George W Bush (4.3 trillion).  In fact the only president in the last 30 years to be fiscally responsible was also the only democrat, Bill Clinton.  So much for the GOP being more fiscally responsible.

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