Well Said, Bernie Sanders!

[Jonathan Whatley]

G-Man:

Maybe I misread your tone, which is easy to do on the Internet. I'm sorry if I did.

What needs to be cut is spending - all across the board, no exceptions. Just like with a family that suddenly finds itself unemployed, things that aren't absolutely critical should be slashed to the bone and everything else should have a flat 10 percent taken off the top. The different government agencies will have to find a way to make do with less - cut salaries, be more efficient, etc. It sounds dramatic but if you don't do it now, you'll have to do it anyway in the future once the borrowed money runs out.

And that's a substantive platform, and a net 10% spending cut overall would improve the deficit situation.

I think serious problems would come up implementing such a thing in practice.

Can we really expect to cut 10% from the budget of the IRS without losing more in turn in tax revenues from reduced enforcement?

How would we cut 10% from the budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons? With how many prisoner furloughs, with how much of a cut in staff to prisoner ratios, with how much of a cut in salary and benefits to staff who have families to look out for and other things they could be do with their lives too?

If we implemented a 10% cut in their salary and benefits, it probably wouldn't be surprising if we very quickly lost the majority of, say, physicians and nurses in the Public Health Service, the Indian Health Service, the Bureau of Prisons, in the military without enlistment term commitment, etc. The remainder would include some who were wonderful idealists. Also a number of duds, out of proportion to their number in the previous population.

We could see what we could do to fill the emptied slots with suddenly substantially lower-paid positions in a very competitive market for doctors and nurses. We could try to contract the work out to locums. I think we'd struggle, at best, for locum physicians and nurses for 10% less than current federal public service full-time career salary and benefit costs.

Can we cut 10% out of every corporal's pay stub? 10% out of every MRE?

Or would we leave a very quickly large list of things untouched or much less touched, then have to go out and find other things in the same departmental budgets to lop off further?

Then it's going to cut a lot more than 10% in those functions, and hurt those functions a lot more than the idea of a 10% "across-the-board" cut conveys.

Yes, there are easier examples than this where the system can absorb x% cuts more easily, I don't doubt. This seems to be a thoughtful and nonpartisan overview of the strategy: The 5% Solution: The Dreaded “Across the Board” Cuts (John O'Leary, Governing, July 7, 2010)

And yes, there are big elephants where we could cut a lot more than 10% within some budget lines leaving us a lot more room to let others off. (Though you ruled out letting anything off, saying you'd take 10% even off of essentials.)

Still. I'm not saying you're being a demagogue or any of this here, but I think we've seen across-the-board cuts used in an outwardly appealing but ultimately cheap, trite, and impractical way.

I lived in Ontario, Canada in 1995 when a hard-right conservative, for Canada, provincial government was elected. They promised an across-the-board spending cuts on almost everything. One of the only exceptions was "classroom spending" in education.

Then they released a funding formula for schools that didn't count, IIRC from what I read at the time, hallways as classroom space.

So any spending attributable to school hallways goes into the universe for the across-the-board cut.

Can you shrink hallway space in existing facilities? Almost never. Can you scale, say, a 10% cut on lighting and heating and cleaning and maintenance for hallways and principal's offices and stockrooms and all that, practically, to every school? Even your older, draftier schools in a place that gets very cold in winter and where the capital budget for major retrofits or new school buildings sure isn't close at hand either?

Sure, you can privatize some things or get public-private partnerships or pay consultants for the savings they can find. But how much are they really going to do to save 10% off lighting, heating, cleaning and maintaining non-classroom school spaces even inclusive of their own fees?

At least public schools in Ontario weren't at the breaking point of many elsewhere, and could absorb all sorts of lurching around from crisis to crisis with this and school bus routes and school board amalgamation and so on for a couple terms of conservative government.

But some important, core public services in the U.S. seem to be pared to the bone already. And a death by small cuts is still a death.