Who Will Cut?

Saw my first episode of “Stossel” the other day on Fox Business Network, the network that, for a brief time, actually featured some segments of me ranting from the bunker, on a show called “Happy Hour” – you can find those on my YouTube channel here if you are interested: yes for a brief shining moment, I was on TV.

But I digress. I have always liked John Stossel, he was one of the very few voices on the mainstream media who thought just like us: he was a libertarian and was not afraid to talk about it. Unfortunately, wherever he worked in the mainstream media, they never really knew what to do with him, he did consumer segments etc, but his real strengths were suppressed because the media outlets he worked for never liked his libertarian vision of smaller government.

Now that he has a show on FBN though, he is free to be a libertarian, and talk about the issues he holds dear, one of which is cutting down the size of government. He did a segment the other day where he had on two Congressmen, one a freshman coming in this year, and oine who has been around for a while, and he asked them “How will you cut the budget?” They talked about 2 trillion dollars in cuts, but rightly so, he pressed them again on will they cut even deeper, will the standard “untouchable” things like Medicare,  Social Security, Welfare and Defense be on the table for trimming, will whole departments, like the Department Of Education, the Department of Energy or the National Endowment of the Arts be totally shut down?

The answers were unsatisfying. They didn’t really seem to have the guts to attack the debt, or attack these programs. They seemed to be willing to compromise. Unfortunately, we can no longer afford to compromise. We need our elected officials to really pare government down to pocket size, and this is the best we get?

Maybe they will show some backbone as the session gets underway but at the moment, the prognosis doesn’t look good.

So we need to keep on top of them. In the end, we are the ones paying for it.