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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."
I like his IRS plan!
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.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
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
You just made a great argument for eliminating the federal government agencies that redistribute wealth amongst the states.
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http://www.ronpaul2012.com/2011/10/17/ron-paul-announces-ambitious-%E2%80%98plan-to-restore-america%E2%80%99/
Above is the link to his website directly. Some notable tidbits that the article (along with some slashdot commenters) seemed to miss:
"Cuts of this scale will also be accomplished by a Paul Presidency 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."
Full plan is here: http://ronpaul2012.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5fe6ba5e2c7e9376850ed45ac&id=bfc0992023&e=8c0ac983f9
So as part of this plan he will get rid of:
-Entire TSA
-Corporate (including Oil) subsidies
-End the wars (likely the largest single current expenditure/drain on the economy)
-End foreign aid (which I suspect will keep the U.S. out of more wars and significantly reduce the terror threat to the U.S.)
-15% of military spending (on top of complete ending of war spending)
-Keeps Social Security and Veteran care in place but allows young people to opt out of social security (basically, ending the Ponzi scheme and recognising the debt owed from it).
I will agree that some things he wishes to cut are not things I would choose to get rid of BUT can anyone point out a single other candidate that has a plan in plain, simple terms like his to actually do something? I sure haven't seen anything like this from other candidates. Then again I feel they are all talk. Real problem solvers would have at least a moderately detailed plan up on their website with rough numbers on how to accomplish things. If anyone finds such from other candidates please post in reply. I'd be very interested in seeing other plans even at as high level as this one is.
The plan is extreme but note that even with everything he is removing and reducing it only ends the DEFICIT (i.e. we stop borrowing more) by year three. Most people seem to not realise or accept how much pain the U.S. will have to endure to climb out from the mountain of debt without defaulting. Much like those that make $40,000 and have $40,000 in credit card debt it's a long suffering process. Much more borrowing at the current rate and defaulting on debt is almost an assured result (hence the lowering of the U.S. credit rating). I should point out European nations, most local governments, etc are all in the same situation. Borrowing to get luxuries you can't afford is endemic in the western mentality currently.
I suspect this will also reduce the corruption considerably since there will be many fewer lucrative grants to bribe senators and congressmen to get. That is, if it passes at all. You'll likely need to toss the bulk of republicans AND democrats out to get anything like this through since it will dismantle many of the incentives for funnelling money to them.
15% slash (right there, top line on the second page here: http://ronpaul2012.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5fe6ba5e2c7e9376850ed45ac&id=bfc0992023&e=8c0ac983f9) AND defunding all (undeclared) wars, resulting in immediate pull-out from all, what is it now, 5,6,7 places?
And, since most libertarians agree that national defence is legitimate function of Federal government, and knowing weather and coast around your country has obvious military uses, I would see nothing wrong with NOAA and USGS being funded from DOD budget.
"Fix weights and measures" is explicitly constitutional, so, I'd guess, NIST would be also safe under Dr. Paul's watch.
Paul B.
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.
North Dakota is not geologically inert. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1909_05_16.php
He also wants to axe NOAA, of which the National Weather Service is a part, which tracks weather events like thunderstorms and blizzards that affect North Dakota.
Besides, your callous attitude would seem to lead to something like this:
"Why should I have to do anything to help anyone? Screw 'em." (later) "Eeek, I'm in trouble, why won't someone help me?!"
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).
We know what private industry would have done wrt creating the Internet in the absence of the federal government. Because they did create it. Or rather them.
Compuserve.
AOL
MSN
Prodigy
and others.
Each a walled garden, isolated from and incompatible with the others. Each created to require enforce the idea that customers are clients, rather than allowing arbitrary client/server or peer-to-peer relationships (as business has been trying to do with the Internet).
We already know what business would have created without the Internet. And they sucked in comparison to the real thing. That's why all of these networks began to wane the second the Internet became available to the public. They turned into nothing more than ISPs with portal websites and they only did that because it was that or disappear instantly.
In 1995 Bill Gates was saying that the Internet was a fad and everyone would return to the safety of MSN real soon now.
The idea that if the Internet didn't exist that private industry would have created it is simply a-historical.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.