TM Lutas

Use Government Assets

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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?

Lawfare’s inevitable result

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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

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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.

Create Borrowing and Paid For Budgets

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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.

How to do spending cuts

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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.