Last Friday’s comments included proposals to reduce military spending and spending on bridges & bike paths that go nowhere.
There’s a lot that’s been said about Alaska’s proposal for a Bridge to Nowhere, but it’s true that we have our own, genuine, half-completed project in Whitewater. We’ve not had the publicity, and reporters’ attention, that Alaska got for a mere proposal (Gravina Island Bridge). That hardly seems fair; we got less attention for a real bridge than Alaska got for an earmark that was finally rejected.
I posted one part of a much larger Cato e-book on downsizing the federal government, and possible cuts for the Department of Transportation. The e-book has proposals for all of the federal government, including ideas for reducing defense costs.
(Sections on reducing expenditures by federal department on the DownsizingGovernment.org website are going up department-by-department, and defense is slated for posting sometime soon.)
There’s no question that America has enemies, and we have to right to defend ourselves against those enemies. Tat doesn’t mean we have to spend on every project that’s technologically possible.
More significant, it’s a free-market domestic economy, unburdened by too much spending, that makes possible the wealth that sustains an adequate defense. A productive economy greatly improves the security of America, as it serves as a source of plenty for us, object of admiration for our allies, and formidable safeguard against our enemies.
There’s room for cutting every department of the federal government, including defense.
Small Whitewater, Wisconsin will undergo her own budget deliberations, having held a preliminary meeting about which I’ll comment later. When those deliberations begin, it will make sense to take stock of what local political leaders have proposed, and what’s possible.
For now, it’s enough to say that there’s not been much justification for the status quo. It’s easy to offer platitudes about how many projects we need, but politicians and bureaucrats (bureaucrats most of all) owe the community more than insistence that Whitewater has to keep doing what she’s been doing. Last year, for example, Whitewater’s city manager, Kevin Brunner, began his budget proposal with the contention that demand for services kept rising, and so an increase in the levy was justified. On the contrary, he found from Common Council that keeping the tax levy from increasing mattered more than a supposed popular desire for more taxing.
Worse still, spending and borrowing on multi-million dollar projects provide no benefits to struggling residents; they’re empty efforts of bureaucratic vanity.
Nor, by the way, is cutting anywhere a good idea. Some services are more important than others, and selecting isn’t as cut-and-dried as some budget cutters think.
(For example, I think I can demonstrate that Whitewater should cut elsewhere than Parks and Recreation. I know that at least one Council member is keen to cut there; I’m confident that I can show it’s a bad idea.)
There’s a straw-man view that anyone wanting to cut is a hard-hearted person, interested in cutting with indifference to ordinary people’s lives.
Those who are looking to impose that stereotype will prove disappointed; serious, necessary cuts for reform don’t rest on, or harm, ordinary people, but improve their lives.