re: #502 WindUpBird

The idea of just cutting 10% arbitrarily from the government is a bit like saying to get the weight down on a stock car that you’re preparing for the track, you just take a sawzall and lop off ten percent of its length. Or telling someone that they need to lose weight, so let’s just remove 10% of their bone, fat, and muscle mass surgically. Arbitrary cuts will create more inefficiency, so it seems like you’re less about efficicency and more about the Grover Norquist school of wounding government for ideological reasons.

If you want a government program to be more efficient, you analyze a government program, you bring in people who are intimately familiar with that government program, and you advocate more efficiency case by case. Inefficiency is baked into our entire SYSTEM of government.

The most inefficient thing of all is the very notion of states. Want to start creating more efficiency? How about we go from 50 states to like 8 big ones? :D How much government redundancy and infighting betwee states and pork projects and tax hurdles between states?

All good points- and all point to the institutionalized inefficiencies of government- which is probably why Mr Obama wants to clean house.