STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Cutting the Budget is Bad? So Says the Bipartisan Policy Center
By Staff News & Analysis - June 11, 2012

Sequester Could Wipe Out More Than a Million Jobs … In another dire impact assessment of the more than $1 trillion of automatic cuts in defense and domestic programs, the Bipartisan Policy Center warned on Thursday that the deep savings would greatly add to the country's economic woes by slowing growth and wiping out more than a million jobs – without putting a dent in the federal debt. – The Fiscal Times

Dominant Social Theme: If it's in the budget it has to stay there … forever.

Free-Market Analysis: This article in The Fiscal Times is a bit strange because it doesn't seem to come to a conclusion about upcoming automatic cuts by Congress. We will, though.

The Fiscal Times is a project of billionaire Pete Peterson, a Wall Street mogul who is surely a scion of what we call the power elite. Peterson, like so many other stars of the 20th century, acquired the reputation of a fiscal hawk without ever dealing with the issue of monopoly fiat money and central banking.

Peterson, like so many others, is content to focus on Congressional profligacy without touching the central issue of what money is and who controls it. Perhaps that is why this article is so unpersuasive.

The sequestration cuts next year alone would amount to a 15 percent reduction in almost every defense program and project – much deeper savings than previous estimates – and force layoffs by defense contractors and their suppliers. Domestic programs could come in for similar reductions, although Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – the main drivers of spending – would be off limits to cuts.

The net effect of these mostly arbitrary and abrupt spending cuts would be to drive down the Gross Domestic Product by roughly a half a percentage point and put more than one million Americans out of work over the next two years, according to the study. Federal workers ranging from FBI and border patrol agents to civilian Defense Department employees to government physicians and teachers would face unemployment in early January unless Congress decides to cancel or revise the sequestration.

"At a time when the military is reorienting its mission to new strategic priorities and seeking to modernize its forces as two major land wars wind down in Iraq and Afghanistan, these across-the-board cuts will make it significantly more difficult to ensure readiness, procure new weapons systems and invest in new technology to meet emerging threats," the report said.

"You are going to put [the government] through holy hell, but accomplish very little," said former Sen. Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., a member of a Bipartisan Policy center task force that is assessing the impact of the sequestration. "They wrote a bill that is an absolute fiasco."

Okay. From what we can tell, the bill will prune the US's military and secret police (FBI). It may reduce the amount of resources necessary to fund the US's foreign wars. This is bad … how?

The US now has something like 16 separate government spy agencies and is engaged in ruinous conflicts around the world without a single declaration of war. Congress is far too intimidated by the powers-that-be to contradict these destructive, profligate policies.

The idea that cutting budgets – really cutting them – is destructive to a nation's polity is a kind of power elite dominant social theme. One is supposed to assume that the money already being spent is issued out for a purpose and is being distributed effectively.

But it is not. Government, especially large government, is almost entirely ineffective in the sense that government policies almost inevitably do not achieve their goals.

Every regulation is a price fix, and every price fix transfers wealth from those who create wealth to those who didn't create it may not know how to use it.

National security is often used as a justification for the current US Leviathan, but it is difficult to conclude that national security justifications are anything but manufactured rationale – as much of the "security threats" to the US have been shown by the alternative media to be highly questionable.

And what of the rest of Fedgov's functions? Are we really to believe that every part of the US$ 3 trillion that the government spends is necessary and useful? The US's standard of living has steadily decreased as the amount of money being spent by government increases. There is likely a direct link between outlays and the destruction of society.

Of course, from our point of view, none of this is coincidence. The power elite that wants to run the world uses government to introduce chaos into society and then re-orders that society in ways that continually emphasize global government.

The more government the better. The elites derive their power from central banking and their authority by effectively being in charge of the governments they set up and maintain. The process is known as "mercantilism."

Bankers like Pete Peterson will mention none of this of course. We are never supposed to ask why the system itself became entrenched despite its destructiveness.

After Thoughts

Given what is occurring and the general ruin of the West, the more that big government can be cut – and the sooner the cuts can take place – the better.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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