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Senator Lugar is elected from the state of Indiana. The residence he claims for voting and driving purposes has not been in his possession for many years and several electoral cycles. In fact, he sold it in 1977. The Indiana Secretary of State was just convicted of several class D felonies for fooling around with his legal address during one electoral cycle. If you intentionally misstate your address on a driver’s license it’s actually a worse offense, IC 35-43-5-2(c)(1) makes it a class C felony. That’s 2-8 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Two things possibly protect Sen Lugar in terms of residency. The first is Article 2 section 4 of the Indiana state constitution. The second is implementing legislation, IC 3-5-5-5, both of which say much the same thing, “No person shall be deemed to have lost his residence” in the State and precinct respectively “by reason of his absence, either on business of this State or of the United States.” This leaves the obvious question unanswered, what does it mean, to be on the business of the United States? It could mean that if you’re elected Senator, you can live anywhere until you lose an election or die and you are still an Indiana resident. That seems unlikely. Then again, it could mean that when the Senate is in session or you are on a fact finding trip or other Senate business, those days do not count for residency and where you live the rest of the time is what is judged. In 2011 the Senate was in session 181 days and out 184 days. This would make a great deal more sense and here, Sen. Lugar gets in a bit of trouble.

Sen Lugar sold the Indiana house he actually lived at in 1977 and while he continues to maintain a farm in Indiana, he does not claim residency there. He has a million dollar home in Virginia and stays at hotels when he comes to Indiana. He could pick a hotel room and officially reside from there or he could list his farm address but neither choice is politically convenient for him. The legal requirement is easily satisfied but for 35 years he hasn’t done it.

One thing possibly protects Sen Lugar’s drivers license, that Indiana doesn’t actually comply with the federal Real ID act of 2005 in its requirement that the address on a license is the holder’s principal address. By any reasonable argument, Sen Lugar’s principal address is in Virginia and it would look like Virginia law might also support that.

Sen Lugar is a very popular politician, with cross-party support and a long political career. There is a real reluctance to dig into these matters but here are, perhaps, some questions for those who would like to take the plunge.

In 2011 (and 2010, etc) how many days was Sen. Lugar absent from Indiana on the business of the United States. How many days was Sen. Lugar absent from Indiana on other business?

In 2011 (and 2010, etc) when Sen. Lugar was in Indiana, where did he reside? Why did this address (these addresses) not become his Indiana address? Why does Sen Lugar get to choose his Indiana residence in a way that nobody else can?

The Federal Real ID law requires that a driver license address be the holder’s principal address. Is an address which was sold by the license holder in 1977 consistent with the federal requirement? And if it is not, does Indiana law actually align with Real ID? If they do align, has Sen Lugar violated IC 35-43-5-2(c) by continuing to use his old address for the past 3 years now since the 2009 Indiana driver license reforms were passed? If they do not align is Indiana vulnerable to the penalties of the Real ID act, that its driver licenses will no longer be accepted as ID at federal checkpoints?

Is Sen Lugar in compliance with Virginia law regarding driver licenses? Within 60 days of moving to Virginia, you are required to get a Virginia driver license. Even if you are a full time student, if you are employed, you still need to get a Virginia driver license. Sen. Lugar is certainly employed. He does not claim an address that he actually owns or rents in another state as a residence. According to Virginia law, has he moved? Is Sen Lugar in violation of Virginia driving law?

Ultimately it seems very unlikely that Sen Lugar is going to be called to account for any of this. The point of the exercise is to expose how out of touch he is, not to secure a conviction. Ordinary people have to swap out their license, reregister to vote when they sell their house, actually rent or own a property to qualify for residence, and if the house they usually sleep when not on federal or state business is in Virginia, they accept that they’ve moved. Sen Lugar hasn’t.

Previous in the series:
I, II, III, IV

First there was TEDx, the low cost/no cost to the original TED initiative to spread the TED message around the world in local affiliated events. Now there is MITx, an initiative to create free/low cost classes with an MIT affiliation but no degree. So why isn’t there AFL-CIOx? There is no great leap necessary to figure this out. Fire up a web site and provide tools for all workers to improve their position. AFL-CIOx could provide templates on how to lobby their local governments to diversify local economies and cater to entrepreneurs so the increase in businesses operating locally would improve the chance that different employers would compete for local workers. Employers bidding up salaries in order to compete is how non-union workers get salary increases and it’s a successful strategy. It used to be that union workers earned more than non-union. That is no longer true.

And they could provide “plus” services that would carry a fee that you could take or leave. Hat sales alone would probably cover most of the electricity bill. And yes, I’d buy one. I’d also use the site as I assume a lot of people who would viscerally reject joining a union, ever. Google will index it and people will use compelling content, giving unions a 2nd chance at a large part of the population that have long written them off as irrelevant and outdated.

So where is that site? Where is the effort to improve the position of all American workers by providing a 21st century education on how to be a smart, savvy worker?

Contrary to Instapundit’s regular reminders, I am not stocking up on 100 watt light bulbs right now. That’s because Monday I plan to try and buy them after the toothless New Year’s dead line passes and they are “banned”. It will be an educational experience all around. If I find them stocked, well and good. I have regular retailers with the stones to do the right thing, offer a legal product despite the protests of the nannies. That’s a useful thing to know and something that ordinary people don’t have a chance to find out in the regular course of business with their retailers. As economic corporatism becomes more and more accepted on the left, this will increase in importance.

I’m going to set aside enough time for this chore that I can have several calm conversations with managers at my local retailers in case they have been cowed or are on the other side. Those on the other side lose my business and I go into “name and shame” mode. Not only are these people siding on the side of the green fascists, they’re taking sides in a constitutional battle between the Congress and the Executive. If defunding a regulation doesn’t stop it from taking effect, what point the power of the purse? Those who have been cowed get to find out that they’re between a rock and a hard place and they might as well pick the option that at least gives them additional sales.

A innovation/manufacturing article focused on high tech batteries had an interesting section on A123:

When Yet-Ming Chiang cofounded A123 Systems in 2001 on the basis of his MIT research on battery materials, there was no advanced-battery manufacturing in the United States.
…
So Chiang and his colleagues at A123 built a manufacturing plant in Changzhou, China (see “An Electrifying Startup,” May/June 2008). The move was meant not to outsource production, says Chiang, but to acquire the needed manufacturing know-how. Subsequently, A123 bought a South Korean manufacturer as a way to begin developing the expertise it needed to make the flat cells required for electric-car batteries. When A123 decided it needed to be closer to its potential automotive customers in Detroit, it cloned the Korean plant in Livonia, Michigan, and the Chinese factory a few miles away in Romulus, aided by a $249 million grant from the federal government. As a result of this strategy, A123 was able to become a major manufacturer in a remarkably short time, building the Livonia plant in just over a year and the Romulus plant in nine months.

Methods used by “catch up” countries to do technology and expertise transfer from the US are not one way processes. We can do it in the other direction, and in the case of A123 we already have. What will matter in the future will be legal regime and placing manufacturing close to consumption.

Previous in the series:
I, II, III

Given my positions about work and unions, it would be natural to assume that I would want them to shuffle off into history as fast as possible. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unions are bankrupt, but that doesn’t mean that they are without value. The process of bankruptcy is the process of trying to maximize the value you can save from something when it can no longer continue operating as it has in the past. Ideologically bankrupt unions need to go through bankruptcy to identify and save that value as best as possible, not to kill them off and throw that real value away.

This is where simplistic conservative solutions go wrong. The wasteful idea of “just shut it down” guts political support among the population of people who are frugal and understand what bankruptcy is. These people are natural conservative supporters but they are not going to sign up for wasteful shutdowns that increase net value loss for society. So long as they perceive that there’s more net value to retaining the present arrangements than to tear them down without replacement they will both be unhappy with unions and fight to keep them in business.

Improvement and replacement instead of elimination creates a wider natural coalition. The union label itself will likely live on so long as it has brand value and far beyond it retaining its original meaning.

The invaluable XKCD strikes again with an examination of money.

I think their bias might be showing a bit though, they have an order of magnitude error on GOP campaign finance spending in 2010. They added 3 zeroes onto the GOP actual expenditure. I *wish* the GOP had that much money to throw around.

The Greeks do not need Germany to come bail them out. Russia was in something of a similar situation in the mid-1800s and resolved their financial and strategic difficulties by selling Alaska to the United States. At the time Russia feared that they had to sell Alaska or lose it to British Colombian expansion.

There are over 6,000 islands in Greece of which only 227 are inhabited. These 5500+ are all assets that could be used to satisfy Greece’s debts either by concession, Hong Kong style, or outright sale as Russia’s Alaska holdings were sold. At the very least this is an option that should be talked about. Strategically, a sale could be offered to France, Italy, or the UK (I do not believe the US would be interested) that would create interesting possibilities of introducing a buffer state between the remaining Greek Aegean territory and Turkey. The islands themselves may or may not be worth much but their economic zones, fisheries, and resource possibilities are intriguing.

The idea ultimately may turn out to be insufficient by itself to save Greece. But you really don’t know until you present the idea and so far nobody seems to be pursuing it. I find it odd that a proven method for raising money that does not require default or endanger the EU is not even on the table for consideration.

There seems to be a lot of oppositional thinking about labor and capital. I’m not sure that this is conducive to clear thinking and wonder if putting them on a continuum would lead to more productive solutions to everybody’s problem, how to make money.

In the cycle of producing stuff and serving customers, the later you get paid, the more the risk you won’t get paid at all. To take hindmost position, the capitalist takes the greatest risk and consequently reaps the greatest reward. Flipping over the coin, the sooner you get paid, the less you get paid because your payment is a surer thing and thus you don’t get as much in risk compensation. So the common stockholder gets the biggest rewards and is paid last, preferred stockholders get paid earlier, but their payments tend to be less, ditto bondholders.

Labor is, by definition, made up of people who are paid in advance of sales and regardless of whether there is a profit made of the fruits of their labor. The laborer gets paid first, even more so than the bondholder or the preferred stockholder. But just like the bondholder and the preferred stockholder, getting to the head of the payment line has a price.

Now if you’ve got no reserves, I can see the need to be paid right away. But after age 30 when you’ve got some money put away and could afford to not be paid immediately, would deferring compensation either in part or in whole make sense? In terms of the enterprise you would be reducing the capital requirements to produce and reducing the risk that the capitalist has to take. Payroll would drastically shrink and payout would be in shares as sales came in. Capitalists would have a shrunken role in the enterprise because they would only have to fund the land and the tools. In terms of worker attitude, you would be strongly aligning worker interests with increasing sales in order for their back end compensation to come through. To some extent, these workers would cease to be labor.

Labor would become a phase you went through as a kid, if your family couldn’t stake you to a more normal working arrangement, or right after a bankruptcy, because you’d exhausted your reserves and couldn’t afford to wait for your pay anymore. It might also be something you would do if you lost faith in your company’s future but hadn’t found another position at a different company yet. It could also be used as a weapon, punishing management by demanding to be paid on the front end or the back end and driving up costs by shifting quickly from one to the other.

Would firms accept a lower capital cost and a better incentivized work force in exchange for the risks? I suspect that some would be amenable to it but we’ve gotten so stuck in the rut that labor is paid first and hit with the penalty of not taking part in the risks of the firms that it just hasn’t been considered an option.

Do you believe in communism? In its most technical sense, communism is the idea that bureaucrats can reasonably control production and distribution to provide adequate supply and avoid shortages. At this point, most people say no, they don’t believe, and for good reason. The quest to find a sustainable government system of production that didn’t break down has consumed decades, untold lost production, and created a river of blood as the need for scapegoats of this system’s failure consumed millions of lives.

Do you believe that there is an exception for drug production communism? The US Government thinks there is. In the 1970s it established the current production quota system, a system that is currently in the middle of breaking down as shortages pile up. It is unabashedly communistic with the Attorney General in charge of both overall production numbers of Schedule I and II drugs and List 1 chemicals as well as assigning individual company quotas on a yearly basis.

As virtually anyone with a brain could predict, the system lasted for a while and is now breaking down amidst a growing number of shortages. About 1 in 5 medical practitioners knows of circumstances where these increased shortages have adversely affected patient outcomes. It is unlikely we are going to ever get an accurate body count of this drug communism. Nobody is going to want to open themselves up for liability if they are a private practitioner and no bureaucrat is going to want to turn over this rock because of its political implications.

Fortunately, over the next two years, these regulations are going to finally come under review. So as a practical matter we’re going to have an answer to my title question, do you believe?

Well, do you?

Previous in the series:
I, II

What are the common interests of workers? Do present worker associations, unions, further those goals? This is the heart of any real examination of labor but I can’t recall reading anybody seriously addressing the question.

Workers, in general, have an interest in labor being in short supply relative to jobs in order to drive up the cost of labor. They have an interest in having effective, portable lifetime education available to them at affordable or even free rates. They have an interest in being able to get decent medical care. They have an interest in not being shackled to an abusive employer for any reason. They have an interest in being able to retire from work before their bodies or minds give out and have a dignified retirement that cannot be taken away by anyone.

How do today’s unions stack up in terms of satisfying workers’ interests? I don’t think that they stack up well at all. Unions do create labor supply shortages but it’s on a firm-by-firm basis, forcing employers to exclude non-union dues paying members from employment. If you are not a member, you’re not a real worker in their eyes. Unions provide health insurance through employers but the way that they do it shackles employees to their employer. Union educational programs are not generally portable or accredited or open at all to any sort of healthy competition. And with the coming crackup in Medicare and Social Security, a whole generation of workers is going to feel the betrayal in their pensions.

A worker association that offered accredited education standards and classes meeting those standards would be far superior to present. An association that worked hard to create labor shortages for everybody would raise wages while improving the whole economy. An association that backed associational healthcare would remove the shackles from a lot of workers. And an association that supported a Chile style retirement system would be able to sustainably keep faith with our elders as far as the eye could see.

Previous in the series:
I

I started off this series hoping to get some good comments that would further my rethink. Jim Bennet is an articulate representative of a current in the comments – “The first thing is for the union to realize that the primary interest of the union is to see that the employer survives and prospers.” I disagree but only because it ignores an important case, when employers do not deserve to survive.

I am starting from the premise that in capitalism’s 3 legged stool, there is no privileged leg. Capital, labor, rents, all have their heroes and their villains. All need to have the heroes promoted and the villains marginalized. This line of cooperativist thinking denies the need for villain marginalization. But sometimes we do need to kill off businesses. Sometimes we have too many firms and the weak need to go to the wall while salvaging their resources as much as possible. If either hero promotion or villain marginalization processes are weak or missing, the capitalist system suffers economic performance drops. We must have robust systems to more efficiently kill firms that need to die and labor can play an important role in that capitalist process. Labor needs to judge capital and act accordingly.

Let’s take a look at the UAW, for example and grant that everything they say about GM management is true. Let’s stipulate that collectively, GM management is unimaginative, largely made up of poor planners, make repeated bad decisions over a span of decades, and are generally responsible for running an American icon into the ground. So why did the union let them get away with it when they could have destroyed GM and served their members better? Stipulating that the UAW is entirely right about its indictment of GM management should have led to entirely different behaviors and would have largely saved Detroit and helped keep the rust out of what we now call the rust belt.

The UAW should have looked ahead to the inevitable train wreck and politically encouraged company formation in the areas where its members lived. It should have reworked its own structure so that union members moving to “nonunion” firms didn’t lose out with the union by it. It should have educated its workforce on the need to pass judgment on bad management in a practical sense and the importance of creating enough jobs at good employers so there would be sufficient lifeboats at other firms when GM eventually collapsed under the weight of its poor decisions. The UAW did none of this. That’s a good reason why the UAW needs to be replaced.

The UAW should have encouraged the creation of laws to allow quick approval of low volume models so that custom car builders in the Midwest would be a constant challenge to “the big three” and increase the chances of an American firm with better management rising up on a consistent series of hits and replacing GM. That could happen either by simply outcompeting GM or as NeXT software did to Apple by the guppy swallowing the whale and giving the larger company a management transplant.

A proper representative of labor would be agitating against laws restricting the sale of automobiles to expensive dealership networks, for reducing the cost of approving cars so they can be driven on public roads, and generally for pro-startup legislation. A proper representative of labor would pressure local municipalities and counties to constantly diversify their job base so that no matter how badly a particular company did, members wouldn’t be stuck in dying towns with few job prospects.

A capitalist system that had unions like this would have improved growth prospects, healthier communities, and be much more hostile to bad management wasting resources and serving their shareholders poorly. It makes you wonder why nobody’s made this sort of organization.

As they currently stand, Unions are dangerous dinosaurs. But that doesn’t mean that worker interests have no need for structures that serve their interest. If we’re serious about believing in liberty, we need to address how to create viable, sustainable, superior worker organizations. They might just end up keeping the “union” label if the brand isn’t irredeemably sullied by its present users.

So what characteristics would this new type of organization have?

Sustainably low cost
Concentrate on proactively improving worker situations
Unabashedly pro-capitalist
Interventionist in secondary education, aligning student production better with worker needs.

Anybody have some other features?

Gov. Rick Perry has famously called Social Security a ponzi scheme, a monstrous lie. The Economist magazine, in covering the story has now told its own monstrous lie. It is lying via a graph it included with the story.

The legally mandated 2011 Social Security Trustee Report lays out the actual fund exhaustion date as 2023 on page 3 of the report. So, 2023, 2037, what’s the difference? Electorally, it’s a very big deal. If you’re a current beneficiary today at age 66, you would be 78 in 2023, right at the edge of your life expectancy but more likely than not you would be alive. You would be 92 in 2037 and more than likely dead. If a senior is going to be alive when the big Social Security benefit cut kicks in, it is within their planning window and consequently the chances that they will be a Perry voter go up. Up to now, attempts at reforming Social Security were done so early that the crisis was only going to affect somebody else. Now, every senior who grasps when the crisis will hit knows it will hit them when they are going to be older, weaker, and even more unemployable than they are now. By putting out a pretty, lying graph, the Economist gives ammunition to the left-leaning mass media to write their own stories that also minimize the number of seniors who grasp the truth.

In short, the Economist is putting false numbers out there, ones that will have an effect of lulling seniors into a poorer financial state right when they will be old and frail and unable to do anything about it. What happened to their editors, their fact checkers, their sense of decency? Is everybody to be sacrificed for the electoral convenience of US Democrats in the 2012?

Had my plans, or the jihadists’ plans, been altered just a bit, I could have been up on the WTC tower when it was struck and then fell. I would have been a tourist with my wife and infant daughter stopping in NYC on our way to visit my in-laws in Europe. We could have been part of the death roll. Had my parents rolled out of bed a few hours earlier to take our cousin on a more ambitious tour of Battery Park, they could have been on the death roll, crushed in a subway car passing under the site. I would have been getting a yearly invitation to come to NYC and mourn. How do those who actually get the invitations ever put their lives back together? I can’t imagine the yearly ritual of publicly ripping your emotional scabs off as the world watches.

I suspect that there are tens of thousands just like me. People who visited the area just a bit before or who had been planning to be there but for random chance, fortunate circumstance. Such things change you forever but nothing actually happened to you. Fate hands you the cruelest of brushback pitches and you don’t know what to do with it. It’s deadly chin music but not deadly for you. Do you step back from the batter’s box or crowd in even tighter, daring fate for a repeat? Neither attitude seems right. I claim no special insight or wisdom.

Year after year, people gear up for 9/11 memorials. They’re not for me. They shouldn’t be for me. But they could have been for me. And my heart is still unsettled every year around this time when I look at my older boy who might have been an orphan and my youngest who never would have been.

How to stimulate the economy without inflating the currency or borrowing any more money.

Step 1:
Assemble all requests for federal permits.

Step 2:
Sign them for final approval (as in if they’re interim permits, they are approved for final status as if all other interim applications had been filed and been approved as well). Use auto pens if needed.

That’s it, no step 3 required.

There is now, and always is, a backlog of projects that have funding, are ready to go, and only wait the approval of the various administrative arms that they have complied with this or that regulation. If those projects go forward, the economy will be in better shape. So why not just sign the permits, let construction proceed, and mitigate the bad decisions on the back end when the economy has recovered?

Edit:
Just to make things clear, there are 51 executives in the USA who can do this. The President would likely have the biggest effect but certainly governors would be able to do this on their own as well.

The government of the United States has a large number of assets. Some of them we use. Others we leave idle. Of the idle ones, some of them have people lined up, right now, willing to pay good money to buy or lease them. For political reasons the Obama administration is turning down a portion of that money every day. Instead, they would prefer to increase our taxes and have bumped us up against our debt ceiling and are threatening default rather than lease assets for oil exploration, mining, or timber production.

When our executive is in the midst of an unofficial and arguably illegal campaign to leave certain productive assets idle and not permit the logging, oil drilling, and other natural resources exploitation leases that Congress has authorized to take place, it is obscene to insist that increased tax rates must occur to protect these revenue limiting policies.

Let’s be clear. These permit slowdowns cost the Treasury money, are not authorized by any statute, and if they would stop would both increase employment and revenue. The NIMBY and environmentalist interests who disproportionately supported this President in 2008 and are poised to do so again in 2012 are making our fiscal crisis worse in a misguided attempt to create idle assets.

We can increase revenue by maximizing our leases. This does not take any act of Congress. Congress long ago did its part of the job. This is a problem created by, and wholly solvable by the President and his political backers who have their people appointed to the posts approving those leases.

We are not maximizing our revenues. We are leaving money on the table and this administration’s explicit policy is to take money out of ordinary american’s pockets in higher tax rates and keep them unemployed rather than allow the creation of resource extraction jobs. Shouldn’t clearing the lease and permit backlog and putting americans back to work be the first priority in these times?

From Strategypage, evidence that lawfare leads to more enemy dead, fewer prisoners.

Iraqi security forces have had a growing impact on terrorist operations. This largely goes unreported, but the Iraqi police and soldiers, especially the elite counter-terror units, have interrupted many terror attacks, and arrested many terrorists. Aware of the corruption of the courts and regular police, the counter-terror units will often just kill key terrorists during raids, rather than risk the prisoner bribing his way to freedom. This is also an unofficial policy in some American operations, and official policy when missile armed UAVs are used.

We get enough intel and the risk of further friendly casualties is far enough above zero that we’re just killing people out of hand when in the past we might have sought to capture them. Congratulations lawfare participants in the media and legal professions. Their blood is on your hands.

cross posted @ Flit-TM

Peonage is a form of involuntary servitude that is undertaken to pay off a debt. Realistically, peonage is what we in the US are facing if we do not get our spending under control.

Today, when politicians propose to continue the spending train with unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky spending cuts that will never happen, they are proposing decades of peonage for us and our posterity. This is worse than wrong policy, it is viscerally offensive to everyone who understands the situation.

The norms of political correctness in the US do not normally permit a white to accuse a black of working to violate the 13th amendment. We do not live in normal times. President Obama is dancing on the edge of a precipice and if he persists in going over the edge, he will be taking the country with him. We must have serious proposals from both parties to step back and restore sustainable government finances. The Republicans have stood and delivered. President Obama and his party have prettied up debt peonage for the nation.

In these times of fiscal insanity, the US desperately needs as many moments of clarity as it can get. One way to get an institutionalized moment of clarity on federal spending is to explicitly state which programs are paid for by our own tax monies and which programs we pay for by borrowing money. The most important programs go into the paid for budget and the stuff that’s nice to have goes into the borrowing budget.

There is little cost associated with this process. All the same spending will happen except that instantly all the incentives change. Getting a spending item into the paid for budget makes it secure. It is a statement that we are willing to pay taxes to do this activity. Getting a spending item into the borrowing budget means that if there is a fiscal crisis (and at this point that’s more a when than an if) we would all have a first order screen that we could instantly use to focus our cuts on the stuff that Congress determined was not as important.

Another very good effect on our politics is identifying where do interest payments go, in the paid for or borrowing budget. Every US consumer knows in their bones that if you’re paying off your debts with borrowed money, you’re in deep, deep trouble. So where would Congress put debt interest payments? By putting them into the paid for budget, they inspire confidence but at the same time this decision would push many more programs onto the borrowing budget.

As a separate process, a bipartisan committee (similar to the successful BRAC committees that cut defense spending in the 1990s) could take the borrowing budget and provide a yearly fiscal sanity bill that took the borrowing budget and identified cuts to distribute fairly across the nation and across all the low priority programs in an intelligent way.

But even without an institutionalized spending cut process, this change would improve things by setting priorities and getting the spending conversation where it should be, is program x, y, or z worth borrowing money to fund.

Right now, the USA needs adults who are capable of cutting spending in order to save the republic. Children are incapable of cutting budgets. Adults prioritize and cut what is least needed, even when the cuts are painful, because they know that they face ruin if their expenditures exceed their income over the long haul.

As citizens it is our duty to find out if our representatives are adults or children and to replace the children with adults.

Our country currently faces ruin if we do not cut spending. This economic ruin will most impact the poor and the economically vulnerable as well as robbing our children of their future. It does not matter so much which government expenditures are cut as it matters that our spending stops exceeding our revenues.

Let the left make a list of gold plated DoD expenditures they want to eliminate. Let the right come up with its list of programs and departments it wants to do away with. And pick some from column A and some from column B and do this thing. We can survive getting the mix wrong of which programs we cut. We cannot survive not cutting.