Making the Cut

As we all know money is on most everybody’s mind in these hard economic times, coupled with our Congress fighting each other over the debt and spending issues. No one in Congress has put any permanent solutions on the table but Cut, Cap and Balance seemed to be a step in the right direction. The House Republicans came up with a plan and the Democrats say it is DOA before the House ever voted on it.

When will the toddlers on Capitol Hill figure out they were hired to do a job, not argue and refuse to work together? We The People are their boss and if they cannot work things out with their fellow employees then they should be FIRED! No matter which side of the aisle they sit on they should be fired if they cannot work things out like the adults they claim to be.

With over six trillion dollars spent by the federal government there is plenty of room to make cuts. Senator Harry Reid got upset when the House Republicans wanted to cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. The last status I could find on the bill was that it had been “returned to the calendar.” Every road taken to try and bring our national budget into the realm of the real world has met road blocks by the Senate.

We spend almost a trillion dollars out of the federal budget on education.  Before these tax dollars can reach our schools we must pay four thousand people on the federal level. The money collected could be spent much more effectively on the state and local level and have a greater impact on our children. I have heard some say that the Department of Education should be eliminated. I personally think that we should keep the Department of Education, but we need to cut it back to roughly one hundred people from the four thousand we have now. I think that one hundred people are more than adequate staff to set forth the guidelines our schools teach to. I know there are countless programs that they “administer” but again the local and state levels normally do most of the “administering” and could make more of each dollar reach the classroom.

The Department of Labor is another fat laden federal waste of tax payer dollars. Sixteen thousand employees that shuffle papers and make up a few figures every now and then. Each state has agencies that actually take care of the people in their state.

The Department of Labor’s mission statement:

“To foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.”

The DOL has its enforcer OSHA who is in charge of collecting the extortion money from contractors and companies that employee we Americans. I do admit that there is some need for OSHA inspectors in some cases but most of the time it is all about the money.

There are countless contractors and those in manufacturing that can attest to the way many OSHA inspectors do not understand the codes they are sent to enforce. Some do not even know the function of pieces of equipment that they are sent to “inspect”. The same ones that are supposed to make sure America’s workforce is safe and properly trained themselves are oftentimes not properly trained.

In 2008 the number of civilian federal employees (excluding the postal service) was just under two million. How many of these positions are not needed? How much money could we save if we could eliminate these unneeded positions? How much of the national debt could we pay off by eliminating the unneeded positions?

For those of you that own firearms, train hard and well and teach those that do not know how.
Be good stewards of the right to bear arms, for we are the last line of defense against tyranny.

-Benjamin Wallace