Comment by throw0101c
2 days ago
> 1. The people voted for smaller government […]
The people voted for President and the people voted for Congress. If Congress, who under the US Constitution controls the purse, votes for a level of "X" spending why does the President get to decide to spend <X?
> 6. In general, “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true.
It is not obviously true. Because what you're cutting may be resiliency.
To use a tech analogy: if I have two firewalls in an HA configuration, then decommissioning one to save on support costs will not break things… until the first one goes belly-up and there's no failover.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that more government capacity is actually needed (at least in certain sectors):
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...
The IRS for example would probably do better with more resources:
> That’s one reason that five former commissioners of IRS, Republican and Democrat, have argued eloquently that additional IRS resources would create a fairer tax system. The logic is simple. Fewer resources for the IRS mean reduced enforcement of tax laws. Though the tax code has become more complex, prior to the IRA real resources of the IRS had been cut by about 23 percent from 2010 to 2021.
* https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/cutting-irs-resources-and...
> Congress asked the IRS to report on why it audits the poor more than the affluent. Its response is that it doesn’t have enough money and people to audit the wealthy properly. So it’s not going to.
* https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...