As an alternative, Mississipi could always raise the taxes on themselves to pay for what they want. Or they can stop supporting some things. It's not like the Federal Government can get money from some place the states can not.

If you would kindly tell me where you'd find room to cut half of the state's motherfucking budget I'm sure our state legislature would be interested.

Well, you could look at everything under that budget receiving Federal Funds and ask why it is receiving Federal Funds. By the way, how about starting with eliminating the "Arts Commission" and save $2.8 Million right there? And yes, I do realize we are talking about $8.4 Billion from the Fed, of which Social Welfare make up $4.6 Billion of. Wow, Mississippi spends a high percentage on Social Welfare programs. I'm curious what the $1.4 Billion in "Agricultural and Economic Development" goes towards.

Salvation122 wrote:No, you ignorant dolt, it means most states would be utterly fucked.

Whoa, whoa, whoa buddy. Calm down. Arres isn't being insulting here, no need to jump to that. Hell, even cs22 is being pretty civil, so it's not like you have need to get riled up.

Seriously, dude. Take it down about 8 notches.

Salvation122 wrote:

collegestudent22 wrote:Yeah, because taxes don't scale based on population or anything.

Costs scale faster.

You said "costs" I believe you meant "layers of parasitic government bureaucracy" instead.

adciv wrote:Wow, Mississippi spends a high percentage on Social Welfare programs.

When most people think welfare programs, they think ghetto trash breeding more trash to get a bigger welfare check or stinky messicans sucking the system dry to send back to their family back home. Sometimes it's easy to forget that there are plenty of white trash families living off the government, too, and who have absolutely no aspirations for anything better.

Trash is trash, regardless of color.

Deacon wrote:When most people think welfare programs, they think ghetto trash breeding more trash to get a bigger welfare check or stinky messicans sucking the system dry to send back to their family back home. Sometimes it's easy to forget that there are plenty of white trash families living off the government, too, and who have absolutely no aspirations for anything better.

I was looking at it being about $6.1B or almost 1/3 of the state budget. That's near double the $3.1B spend on education. So unless you have another metric for Social Welfare, that still seems like a lot of money to me.

collegestudent22 wrote:Alright, I will go into it then. To cut $1T from the budget, you would need to do this:

Cuts to the Department of Energy: Savings - $17B
Cuts to the Department of Commerce: Savings - $2B
Cuts to the Department of Agriculture: Savings - $131B
Elimination of the Department of Education: Savings - $107B
Cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services: Savings - $81B
Elimination of the Department of Housing and Urban Development: Savings - $62B
Cuts to the Department of Transportation: Savings - $85B

Total: $485B - and they haven't even touched Defense, Justice, Labor, State, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, or Treasury (this would have large cuts merely from the institution of the flat tax). Or any mandatory spending, which also needs to be reduced through privatization of Social Security and massive reforms of Medicare/Medicaid.

In addition, Cuts to the DoD: Savings - $150B, bringing the total to $635B in cuts. Although, I will say that there are things I disagree with in the proposed cuts here - and things I think need to be cut that aren't proposed. Regardless, $150B is a rather conservative amount to cut, IMO.

Necroing this thread to add an updated CATO plan for cutting $1T+ from the budget (balancing it, as well) by 2021. Just in case anyone wants to take a look.

By 2021, these include $150 billion in defense cuts and $490 billion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the 2010 health care law. The table also includes other discretionary and entitlement cuts valued at $445 billion in 2011.

I will just point out that the "cuts" to Medicare, etc., are better referred to as savings from enacted reforms, including indexing Social Security to prices instead of wages, turning Medicaid into a block grant to the states, repealing Obamacare, and changing Medicare in a similar way as the Ryan plan (warning: PDF of proposed legislation). Strangely, despite being for the entire budget, it comes in at just 629 pages - instead of the multiple thousand pages of legislation like Obamacare.

I have not read that whole thing (just glanced at part of it, basically), but a lot of their wording and concepts really resonate with me in a big way. Such as, on the subject of subsidies:

Each subsidy program costs money, generates a bureaucracy, spawns lobby groups, and encourages more people to demand freebies from the government. Individuals, businesses, and nonprofit groups that become hooked on federal subsidies essentially become tools of the state. They lose their independence, they have less incentive to innovate, and they shy away from criticizing the government.

I would attempt to crunch the numbers on this if I had even the slightest clue how, but y'all seem like a well-informed bunch. What kinds of reductions in deficit and unemployment would the US see if we were to eliminate the more parasitic aspects of free trade? American consumer goods are rarely bought abroad, we don't really make anything here anymore, and it seems like a lot of income from companies that outsource their work just stays overseas. I know implementation would be a diplomatic nightmare (Germany alone might declare an all-out war on us), but wouldn't it be beneficial in the long run to take a long, hard look at policies that seem to be driving companies out of the US?

First thing might be to correct your assumptions. The US is still the worlds leading manufacturer, producing about 20% of the worlds goods per year. We had exports total over $1.27 TRILLION in 2010.

What are the "parastic aspects of free trade". Could you give an example of any? As to the "policies that seem to be driving companies out of the US", that is another matter and primarily comes from regulations that increase the cost of doing business in the US.

Oh, on "companies that outsource their work just stays overseas", that depends on what something is. If a company has a lot of sales in a country besides the US, it makes sense to do work there. If Coke is making product for India, why would it want to ship everything there from the US when it can set up a factory there and skip the shipping? The good news is the profits come back to the US where people like me own stock.

If you mean work for building things that then get shipped to the US, blame regulations that increase the cost of doing business. Look at how companies have been leaving some states and moving to others for examples.

Hm, maybe I was misinformed.

I was under the impression that while the US is friendly to importation of goods, US goods tend to be assessed tariffs by many of our international trade partners (Germany, Japan, and Singapore, for example). I also think that I mixed free trade policy and the difficult business climate in the US together in my thoughts (hopefully understandable, given that the two tend to be intertwined). I apologize.

Maybe a better question to ask would be: Would restructuring the way the US handles international trade be a big help in getting the budget under control, or would it be a drop in the bucket?

Elwin Ransom wrote:I was under the impression that while the US is friendly to importation of goods, US goods tend to be assessed tariffs by many of our international trade partners (Germany, Japan, and Singapore, for example). I also think that I mixed free trade policy and the difficult business climate in the US together in my thoughts (hopefully understandable, given that the two tend to be intertwined). I apologize.

The US tariffs are generally low, where they exist. However, free trade agreements are treaties that specifically prevent the signing nations from putting tariffs on goods from the other nations. So if we aren't charging tariffs on imported goods because of a treaty signed with Germany - they won't be charging tariffs on our goods.

Maybe a better question to ask would be: Would restructuring the way the US handles international trade be a big help in getting the budget under control, or would it be a drop in the bucket?

If by restructuring, you mean eliminating free trade agreements and returning to protectionism, it would do very little for the budget. More importantly, it would likely start trade wars, and crash the American economy even more by virtually eliminating affordable import goods.

And further reducing American exports to other countries. Then again, there aren't that many free trade agreements for the US. Here's the full list for countries. Of those we currently have free trade agreements with, we hold a trade surpluses with Jordan, Australia, Chile, Singapore, Bahrain, Morocco, Oman, Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. In fact, it's interesting looking at trade balances with various countries. see here. All told, we had a trade surplus with about 145 countries and a deficit with about 90.

Now, onto the new question.

Would restructuring the way the US handles international trade be a big help in getting the budget under control, or would it be a drop in the bucket?

Exactly how would it even affect the budget? It's been almost a hundred years since tariffs were a major source of revenue for the US. The major source now is the income tax. The most direct way international trade affects that is by affecting jobs in the US. Now, you can complain what you want about jobs going oversees, but it also provides a good number of jobs in the US with $1.25T in 2010 exports. Yes, T as in Trillion.

Now, we can point to China and some of their deliberate manipulations as the easy one to point out. I won't disagree that is a problem, but it isn't universal.

adciv wrote:Now, we can point to China and some of their deliberate manipulations as the easy one to point out. I won't disagree that is a problem, but it isn't universal.

Not to mention a free trade agreement would prevent many (but not all) of those manipulations.

Not completely, but it would help. China has used Taxes, Tariffs, Quotas and outright bans to manipulate trade. A Free Trade Agreement would eliminate the tariffs, but the other three would probably need to be specifically added to it to cancel out some things China has done.