By the way, while the budget does need to be brought into balance, that’s not been something the GOP has been particularly concerned with for the last several decades – EXCEPT when a Democrat is president, whereupon it’s suddenly an emergency of the gravest sort.
If one does want to solve the fiscal problem, the solution isn’t going to lie in regulatory programs and the like. The deficit exceeds the discretionary budget, so if we eliminated essentially everything we’d still be in deficit.
And then there’s the fact that these butcher-jobs on federal agencies are going to cost a LOT of money. Lower tax revenue from IRS cuts will start it off, but ultimately, when we need to find and hire back most of the people we’ve cut and repair the damage to the programs on which they worked, we’re going to spend a lot more money than if we’d just kept them working.
And then, the one that seems a tad ironic and twisted to me. I spent many years of my career basically suing government agencies and officials for various forms of regulatory overreach; so I can’t say that I have any innate prejudice in favor of regulatory agencies, some of which I’ve seen doing the most awful things (though usually at the state, rather than federal, level). But the thing about cutting agencies is that if you don’t cut their program responsibilities at the same time, it doesn’t mean that people aren’t subject to the regulations – it means instead that the regulations are very, very badly administered. Permit applications take forever. Decisions become more arbitrary because nobody’s got the staff time to do it right. People used to ask me about “defunding” the Washington State Department of Ecology. Now, I knew a few people at the WSDOE who behaved like gangsters and whom I was very glad to beat up in litigation; but I could never endorse the idea of using that as a pretext to “defund” anything. Regulatory reform? Sure, if it’s the right kind. Elimination of department responsibility for programs it mis-administered? Maybe, in the right case. But defunding them would only have made my clients’ problems worse.
Trade deficits, of course, are more the consequence of domestic individual behavior than they are of trade conditions. And the classic right-wing stance, with which I happen to agree, is that they don’t need addressing at all: Milton Friedman was a particular proponent of that view.
