Conservative Cuts Have Consequences (Rand Paul's budget proposal)

[napi21]

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011020607/conservative-cuts-have-consequences

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Dr. Paul, budgets with a meat cleaver, hacking some government agencies out of existence. Others are all but eliminated, and simply sliced within an inch of their lives. A few more are left on life support (for now) and in the care of the agencies that still stand (for now.)

The body count and wounded list include:

The Department of Education - Cut 85%, with only the Pell grant program surviving.
The Department of Energy - Cut 100%, with the Department of Defense taking over its remaining functions — like nuclear waste, for example.-
Housing and Urban Development Cut 100%, veterans' housing programs transferred to the VA.
Affordable Housing Program - Cut 100%.
Consumer Protection Safety Commission - Cut 100%.
Food and Drug Administration - Cut 62%.
Also up for massive reductions: the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, the Commerce Department, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Science Foundation.

It's almost impossible to cover all of the human consequences of Sen. Paul's proposed cuts in one blog post, as they would impact millions of Americans across the country. But the reality is that the programs he and other conservatives want to cut are designed to solve specific problems that real people are having. The GOP has all kinds of plans to reduce, cut, or eliminate these programs and much-needed services they provide but no plans to replace them.

A Lexington Herald editorial suggests the best place to start is with the impact of Paul's cuts on his own Kentucky constituents.

There's allso a link to Rand's actual proposal at the site above. I think he's just trying to make news headlines because even HE has to know his ideas are far too radical to ever be enacted.

[gratuitous]

1. Rand Paul is a slave, an automaton

He doesn't have any free will or personal judgment, he's just a black box of Libertarianism. If you can't afford to, for example, test your own food for wholesomeness or your own drugs for safety, that's your problem, not the government's, and certainly not the problem of food producers or drug manufacturers. You chose to be too poor to hire your own testing laboratory, and there's no reason for major corporations to have to take on the expensive regulatory burden of marketing products that don't poison consumers. Besides, once the word gets out sufficiently that buying Bread Brand X or Drug Brand Y is akin to buying a death lottery ticket (with odds greatly enhanced over other lotteries), those companies will eventually go out of business thanks to the Magic of the Free Market.

Of course these proposals are ridiculous. But they sound just good enough to just enough people to give Paul sufficient credibility that the people of Kentucky will elect him. A lot of people are quite inured to the fact that government doesn't look out for them, and they're so accustomed to making do that they can't imagine a different system. Demand food that won't poison you? But what if the company goes out of business? I could lose my crappy job and be even worse off than I already am! Besides, if these fool policies go through, I might save a dollar a month on taxes, and that's 12 more dollars a year. For me!