I’m liking Rand Paul more and more. I wish he was one of my Senators!
I see where he has put forth a plan to slash the Federal budget by 500 billion dollars. Now there’s a step in the right direction. And where does he suggest the government stop spending our money? He suggests eliminating several programs altogether while shrinking others and folding them into other departments.
He suggests eliminating the departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development. Now I don’t really know that much about HUD so I will refrain from making any comments about it other than to say I don’t see where the Constitution enumerates a power for the federal government to be involved in this area. As far as the Department of Education is concerned, I can only see good things coming from it. Like HUD, there is no real Constitutional justification for it. The Department of Ed has proven to be a billy club the Federal Government has been able to use to force schools into conforming to their social engineering experiments. Without it, the Feds would have played holly hell in forcing such things as Title IX on our schools. Their threat to pull all Federal funds from schools if they didn’t comply was analogous to organized crime forcing protection monies out of store owners. But instead of making the schools pay them money, they forced the schools to have a women’s sport for every men’s sport. How many millions/billions of dollars were spent by school systems on programs that were lightly supported by their own communities just to protect the flow of Federal dollars that should never have been there in the first place? Leave education up to the states and local communities. Let them put the emphasis where they feel it is most appropriate.
Rand also suggests the elimination of funding for the National Endowment of the Arts and the Public Broadcasting Corporation. What a marvelous idea! I mean really, how much great art, as judged by the majority of the folks paying the freight, has come from publicly funded artists? A WHOLE lot of mediocre to plain old sucky art has come from it, but damned little good to great art. When you look back over time and see when art was funded by the artist’s ability to produce art that had a base willing to pay for it or a patron willing to spend their personal finances on it, a lot of great art was produced. This holds true from Michael Angelo to Fredrick Remington. Art that doesn’t have individuals who are willing to spend their personal wealth on it tends to degenerate into bull squeeze rather rapidly. And that’s exactly what the NEA tends to engender.
As far as the Public Broadcasting is concerned, if it were even handed in the way it presented information, I could see a value to it. But it doesn’t! Federally funded public broadcasting is taking its money from all of the American people in order proselytize for the beliefs of about 20% of the people. If it is going to be an advocate for only one segment of the population it should be forced to receive its funding from that group. It should not be able to take monies to operate from those who disagree with their positions.
Then there is the elimination of foreign aid. What a grand idea he has there. (I suppose I’m particularly fond of this one because I’ve advocated this for years.) Why in God’s name would we be giving billions of dollars away to other countries when we are having to borrow money to keep ourselves running? Couple that with the fact that the majority of this money seems to go to countries that don’t like us in the first place, it becomes more troubling still. And if that weren’t enough, some studies indicate that in many of these corrupt countries, less than 30% of it actually makes it to the folks it was meant to help. Corrupt politicians and bureaucrats stealing the rest. Then top it all off with the fact that in several cases our money is going to fund enemies of ours and our allies. What a colossal cluster schtoup foreign aid turns out to be.
Now don’t get me wrong, I fully believe that many of these places like Haiti or areas of Africa are deserving of assistance. But why not say, ok, if you ask for help from us, we will come in and do X, Y or Z. We will be the ones doing the work, thus assuring that what money we do spend actually goes to the issue we mean to address. Not some corrupt SOB’s personal luxury account. We will be there for a specified period of time to accomplish a specific task. We would not go there on some warm and fuzzy “improve the living conditions” type mission that would have no clear cut end point. This would also create jobs for Americans, to do this work.
Rand seems to have hit upon the key to solving our fiscal problem. He’s seen we’re in a hole so the first thing he wants us to do is stop digging!
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