The Budget Battle Begins

Now is the time when the rubber hits the road. We’ve had a reminder of the ideals this country was founded on by reading the Constitution on the floor of the house (now that was really historic), we’ve had our “largely symbolic” repeal vote of ObamaCare (with a Democrat senate and an unfeeling Democrat President, we could expect nothing else, I guess), so now its time to get to brass tacks: cutting the budget.

Most of us understand that the only way back to prosperity is to severely cut back budgets, kill programs and if possible shut down whole departments who have far outlived their usefulness. We are not just doing it because we want to , we now have to do it because we have to. It’s no longer an option.

We must be strong. There will be pain, and some will suffer. But its for the good of all in the end.

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.