re: #401 RogueOne

Where are my shoes?

No, Rogue, you’re not getting it. Any number ‘across the board’ is dumb. It’s the ‘across the board’ part that’s really stupid. The number itself doesn’t matter. It’s what the spending is actually on, and what it actually achieves, that need to be figured out.

If the money is being spent redundantly, as is a lot of it, then it’s perfectly fine to cut. Examples of this: a Federal agency doing inspections of something that has already been inspected by a state agency with higher standards than the federal agency. That goes on all the time. It’s dumb. Cut that out.

If the money is being spent with no expected outcome— wishful spending— then it needs to be examined. Spending money to ‘raise awareness’ always bugs me. Spend the money on fixing the problem and raising awareness at the same time.

If the money is being spent and achieving results, then don’t fucking cut it. If your fire inspectors are doing a good job of preventing fires, if your health inspectors are doing a good job on cutting down on the botulism outbreaks, then you can look for ways to make it more efficient, but simply cutting spending isn’t going to achieve that. It’ll most likely just overburden the remaining workers, causing standards to slip, and costs to rise elsewhere in the system as more fires break out, botulism incidents rise, etc.

Do you seriously not understand this?