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Ron Paul Suggests Axing 5 U.S. Federal Departments (and Budgets)
sciencehabit writes with this selection from Science: "Presidential hopeful Ron Paul's new proposal to slash federal spending would wipe out large chunks of the government's research portfolio. The congressman from Texas and Republican candidate has unveiled a budget plan to reduce the deficit that would eliminate five federal departments: Energy, Commerce, Interior, Education, and Housing and Urban Development. In one fell swoop, such a step would erase, among other programs, the Energy Department's $5-billion Office of Science, the $4.5-billion National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the $750-million National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the $1.1-billion U.S. Geological Survey."
if folks don't know anything, it can't hurt them, right?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
No more energy research, no more parks, no more public education, no more low income housing, no more roads & bridges. What a grand utopia he has planned for us.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Getting rid of the BATFE and the TSA instead?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
"For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple--and wrong."
--H.L. Mencken
That if this happened, after the next earthquake or hurricane demolishes a few large metropolitan areas people would be wondering why we had no warning.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Doesn't the DOE spend a good deal of its time dealing with nukes?
Isn't that kind of important? Even to libertarians?
is a nutjob.
I had a long dissertation thought out, but man, this shit just boggles my mind. NOAA? Is he kidding? I'm sure all of you remember (probably not, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt) the fact that he said that "Hurr, Galveston didn't have anyone to bail them out during their hurricane" totally forgetting how many people /died/ because of no hurricane warning and forecasting.
The next time there's a hurricane coming up Galveston Bay, I want Ron Paul to be out in the middle of it. Outside. Naked.
--
BMO
The US needs a nuclear weapons program. We need border patrol. We need specialized regulatory and enforcement agencies like FCC. Pretending that all these programs are optional to anybody, even the most retrograde conservative, is just empty posturing and shameless pandering to ideologically driven morons.
Jeez. Because deregulating the financial sector has worked soooooo very well.
So people would have to pay to find out if a hurricane is going to nail them?
Ah America, land where sociopathic greed is not only approved of, but actually encouraged.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ron Paul seems like an intelligent, thoughtful man. Let's avoid a knee-jerk reaction to this "news". Maybe he has an idea to continue providing the core public services of these departments while cutting bureaucratic complexity. I don't think there's enough information here. Then again, it's a lot more fun to get indignant!
* I see he's not touching the Dept of Agriculture. Too many farmers on the gov't dole vote, I guess.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is about as newsworthy as Ron Paul declaring that he plans to remodel my kitchen. Barring a long series of astronomically unlikely events, he's not going to get anywhere close to having the authority to do so. Providing passing entertainment on Slashdot during a slow news day may well be his high water mark.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
"In terms of mapping rocks and whatnot, there are great incentives for energy and mineral companies to perform this kind of research internally."
There is also great incentive for them to keep that data secret and never publish any of their research, because doing so would allow their competitors to benefit.
That's the thing about Ron Paul. He makes a few good points once in a while, but he's such an extremist that he just wants to wildly slash everything in government with a machete. That's not the solution to anything. Most of the organizations he wants to destroy actually do good things and serve important roles, but may need to simply be restructured to better serve those roles instead of just throwing money at them in their current form. And that's not to mention the literally thousands of jobs he would be cutting to serve his agenda.
Ron Paul's mind is still a hundred years in the past. He's regularly citing things from far back in the country's history. Things that worked back then won't work today. Society's complexities and modernizations require some degree of management or oversight. Paul doesn't see that because all he can see is the fantasy of small government he envisions of yesteryear.
The USA isn't a western. Let's stop trying to treat it like one.
I get it, they are reporting what they want to see kept (I want to see them kept too). They are a drop in the bucket compared to the 1 Trillion dollar the plan cuts.
Or in the plans on words:
"Cuts $1 trillion in spending during the first year of Ron Paul’s presidency, eliminating five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education), abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and returning responsibility for security to private property owners, abolishing corporate subsidies, stopping foreign aid, ending foreign wars, and returning most other spending to 2006 levels."
"Makes a 10% reduction in the federal workforce, slashes Congressional pay and perks, and curbs excessive federal travel. To stand with the American People, President Paul will take a salary of $39,336, approximately equal to the median personal income of the American worker. "
He also goes to lower taxes which I don't like, which he can actually "afford" in his plan. The plan is certainly not what I would want, but it's the first serious plan I've seen from the Right in a long time.
Read more. http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/ron-paul-plan-to-restore-america/
You do realize, right, that all those private companies who are "more apt at the weather stuff" are doing it based on... weather data that they get for free from NOAA, right? Jesus, I wish the "seasteading" movement would get going, so we could export all our libertarians.
You are aware, I trust, that the USGS is responsible for a large number of monitoring programs. Basically, killing it would essentially leave the West Coast of the United States without tsunami, earthquake or volcano alerts. I'm sure the people that live along that very geologically active strip of turf will be happy to know that Ron Paul considers them essentially expendable in his quest for ideological purity.
Why should the people of North Dakota pay for tsunami monitoring for California? If the west coast wants earth quake and tsunami warning, they can pay for it.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
but NEVER can come up with plans or their own
You clearly don't read enough, or simply ignore what you disagree with. Frank, Kucinich, Sanders (independent), and others have alternatives. Each has merits.
Developers: We can use your help.
Yea, better to ditch essential services than tax rich people.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Yep, he's the only guy that makes any sense. The two entrenched parties can only shoot holes in his ideas, but NEVER can come up with plans or their own. Of course, he won't get elected.
Ironically, the last president to reduce the size of the federal government was Clinton (he really was a fiscal conservative) -- don't slash entire departments, pare them back, look for redundancy or those pesky things which were created but have now taken on a life of their own because their original directive has passed or become moot.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ahem. "The Congress shall have Power To..." is authority, not a mandate. The Congress can choose not to exercise its power in a given area if it wishes. In fact, in some circumstances, the fact that Congress has chosen not to legislate may itself be considered a form of regulation, and not subject to further regulation by the states.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
Intel, HP, Apple, Xerox, Edison Electric Light Company, Standard Oil (they reduced the cost of kerosene by 80%), Ford, etc, didn't come from public anything.
Second, the states can pick up any of these 'profitable' public enterprises that Paul is proposing to be thrown out.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Ron paul's economic ideas are head-crushingly, fucking stupid.
There is no practical acknowledgement of the role of government in his world-view. He's one of those fucking crazy idiots who thinks that economies magically regulate themselves. We've got 30 years of history demonstrating that he and all libertarian fetishists are DEAD WRONG regarding that subject.
Why the fuck is anyone listening to this doddering old fool?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Because North Dakota benefits from having a California that doesn't get devastated by tsunamis or earthquakes. The same way that the world benefited from Japan not being completely flooded by a Tsunami.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I'm sure the people that live along that very geologically active strip of turf will be happy to know that Ron Paul considers them essentially expendable in his quest for ideological purity.
That is simply untrue and completely preposterous. To make such baseless accusations, you should be ashamed of yourself. We all know that Ron Paul considers everyone to be expendable in his quest for ideological purity.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Edison Electric Light Company made extensive use of public owned right of ways.
The price of kerosene dropped 80% during Standard Oil's reign primarily due to increased supply from drilling on (mostly) public lands. Who knows how much more it would have dropped if there had been a free market rather than a monopoly in charge.
Ford benefits from massive public investment in road and bridge infrastructure. Ford didn't build any roads or bridges.
So... tell me again where would we be without the public sector?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
You just made a great argument for eliminating the federal government agencies that redistribute wealth amongst the states.
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And members, aside from Paul, of those two parties with plans of their own are fairly common. Particularly, Republican incumbents and/or candidates for federal office with plans that involve dismantling large parts of the US federal government are easier to find than those without such plans.
Yes, there are a lot of politicians that will lie about what they will do in office (or make excuses about why they didn't do it before, but after the next election they will). The difference is that Ron Paul's voting record actually matches what he says.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Is this a joke? Education correlates positively with productive value for society and negatively with burden on society. Put simply, without society paying for childhood education we'll be left with a bunch of drooling half-wits that cost us way more to support than it would to simply give them a K-12 education. If you must see it that way, it's very much self-serving to educate children. In all likelihood, I will never have children of my own so I'm not even talking about it from that angle. Someday when I'm old the current batch of students will be running things and personally, I'd like it if they were at least semi-functional insofar as the average human can be.
There, no moral discussion needed (a blessing since any that puts "moral right" and "fruit of someone else's labor" in the same sentence will always devolved into some mind-bending justification for how it is noble to exploit human beings).
"There shouldn't be any US gov't financed research and development." Yep, who the hell needs research on drugs for non-profitable disorders.
"There shouldn't be any public property and so there shouldn't be any public owned 'right of ways'." Yep, the interstate system was a tremendous boondoggle, no one made a dime off using it.
"There shouldn't be any subsidies to any oil drilling, all of it should be private and all land / sea should be private, so all of this drilling would bear full costs." No shit, we need to fish them damn oceans dry before anyone thinks of conservation. If the free market doesn't value it, it has no value.
"There shouldn't be any public infrastructure, including highways and bridges." Damn straight, you should pay to drive anywhere.
"There shouldn't BE a public sector outside of border protection, individual liberties/property protection and criminal/contract law." Yer right, who needs NSTA keeping them planes from falling out of the sky, Business School Product are very able to put a price on how many should die before it starts to crimp profits. And that housing bubble should be allowed to occur over and over again, we still have industries that haven't been decimated yet. Clean air and water? Crap, who needs it except a bunch of poor people, let'em buy their own clean air if they want clean air.
Jeezes you are a moron.
because the rest of us pay for their tornado monitoring. Just because you can only think of yourself does not mean that the civilized members of society know how to do whats best for the entire group. Hopefully you'll realize this when you grow up.
"Because lord knows without the Fed.gov no one would ever have bothered to build computers (and all base technologies) and it is only through the guiding light that is the government that such miracles could be wrought."
Government sponsored basic R&D and early-stage development make such miracles much faster. And many miracles depend on lots of other miracles already happening. Some product or idea may have commercial applications but depends on another advance which, in its original stage only had military application.
"Do you really believe that no one would have bothered coming up with semiconductors and all that if there hadn't been a fed.gov market for it? Really? "
There wouldn't have been anywhere near the money and intensity of development. Almost all the semiconductor physics advances from 1945 to 1980's were sponsored by Bell Labs, universtities, IBM (who had huge military contracts for the most advanced systems of course) and military funding and military contracts. At that time Bell Labs counted economically as a government agency---in return for being granted the telephone system monopoly, Bell had to spend a large amount of money on R&D.
For the same reason that the people in California help pay for flood monitoring
http://nd.water.usgs.gov/floodtracking/
Alright, I want every small-government proponent to make a list of 100 things they want to fund, personally? Take a moment, I'll wait. Was drought-proof wheat on your list? Probably not. Do you need drought-proof wheat? If you don't what to be buying your food from Siberia, you sure do. Is there incentive to develop drought-proof wheat? There sure is. Is anybody going to follow that incentive? No. Why? Because it wasn't on your list or anybody else's. You didn't think of it. Or you (wrongly) believe it's not important. Or that somebody else will do it. Who funds drought-proof wheat research? Department of Agriculture research programs.
Alright, now, I want you to make a time budget. How many hours in a day are you going to spend evaluating who should receive your private funding. And be sure you do your research, we don't want Solyndra fraudsters getting it. The DC bureaucrats do this all day, but now YOU have to do it. What's that, you want to delegate it? To a company that takes your money and decides for you, and keeps a chunk of it for itself? Sounds familiar?
Oh but your system is voluntary. Except you don't actually have time to do it.
Do you really WANT to pay the free-market cost of education? Do you want everybody else to? Just how many burger flippers and drug dealers do you think this society can support? Do you want your cancer operated on by somebody who learned from Khan Academy of Medicine on Youtube?
Do you want clean water? Do you think there are incentives for private companies to keep water clean? Environmental protection is expensive, it's true. Turns out making small settlements and dragging out legal cases with in-house council is a lot less. The true incentive is to not keep the water clean. You live in a free society, but your child is DEAD. Oh well.