VA hospitals have a unique clientele -- standard hospitals (and HMOs) would not deal with this subset very effectively -- they cannot drop them and cannot charge them more, so there are fewer incentives that can shift things around and lower the real costs. The Post Office would not really be saved by being completely private, although they would be freer to price more effectively. They are a business with substantial economies of scope/network economies and when business is declining the unit costs go up systematically -- and will continue to do so as the nature of information delivery continues down its current road. In addition, they get stuck with high-cost deliveries because the UPSs have the flexibility to cheery pick. Thus, the costs of competitors would go up and the savings to the economy would not be very large. However, some of the pricing inefficiency is undoubted bureaucratic. You can alter some of the retirement benefits for civil servants, but not retroactively. Remember those things that Republicans think of as sacrosanct - contracts - there are contracts that cannot easily be shifted in the short run. Alter the rules for the time periods base on work to be performed in the future can work, but the savings will not really arrive until WAY out (of course, WAY out is where the big problem lies). As for the amounts for the elected officials, etc., they are not that large, especially given that other parts of the compensation package are below those of private industry for jobs with similar quality people. I see almost no Republicans jumping onto Rep Paul Ryan's bandwagon about re-working Social Security (and Medicare, I think, but I am not so sure about him in that regard) because it is too politically 'hot' and too many of the tea party people have skin in that game and do not want to give it up or recognize that if they go after that piece of the pie that they will not get elected so it is not feasible for them. Outside of defense, social security, debt payments, and medicare, the size of things that you could reasonably cut are small and tend to be the things that the federal government is the natural place to deal with it and generally is not too inefficient. You could quibble about the size, but shrinking such agencies and expenditures would not qualitatively change the budget situation. As for the current administration causing the problem, I think you have to realize that this dive into deep recession was well underway before and that the forecasts for the average unemployment rate for 2010, made at the end of 2008 were for just below 10%. Thus, this is where the previous group left the country. That does not mean that altering the nature of expenditures should or should not be done, but Obama had the good luck and bad luck that the economy was in such terrible shape that he got elected and then was going to be in a bad situation two years later. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were costly they way that they were done, but Iraq was probably a mistake and Afghanistan, give full focus back in 2002, would likely have played out in a less costly manner. Fix those two drains on both the budget and the system and you place things in a much better situation. On the other hand, cutting a bunch of services and transfer payments (since these things stay within the system except for net imports) in the current environment will lead to slower growth of the economy for a bit of time and cut revenues and increase other transfers enough that you would likely lose a good proportion of the savings (50%, 75%?) for several years at least (of course, that is not the long-run problem and these cuts will not take place immediately).One item that I do not know enough of the details about is the health insurance costs because a bunch of this is where the costs show up. Clearly, some of the incentives resulting from the changes will improve the efficiency of the system (and you have to really understand the economics of insurance, self-selection bias, etc to have a good understanding of this part of the puzzle). There are some parts that will create inefficiencies as well, but these are partly the result of the Republicans deciding that they would take their ball and go home so that rather than making the legislation more effective it became more inefficient because the stakeholders on the far left were crucial to passing the thing. So, probably 100 billion of costs are due to this intransigence; this is a pure guess, however.Thanks for the chance for dialog, or are you someone with no real content wanting to solve problems in a real world? Again, one litmus test for the newly elected group and the Republican majority is how much of Paul Ryan's package people are willing to adopt. My guess is that they will not. I do not agree a whole lot on policies, but he has policies that are consistent and have some real advantages. Unfortunately, especially with the changes in campaign finance, this election increased the power of special interests that will be able to pull strings that benefit them as the expense of almost everyone else.
Hunting Season wrote:
It's open season on cuts. No sacred cows. We're broke !
Defense has to dump 90% of the Pentagon bureaucrats with desk jobs.
The Post Office has to be spun off to private industry.
The VA Hospitals closed 100% and patients enrolled at taxpayers expense to HMOs and PPOs.
Retirement and Medical benes for president, senators, congress, politicians, bureaucrats, judges, safety workers, civil servants ended totally. (They can still buy their own insurance with their own money like we have to do).
Any other ideas ?