Gang of six? Or Gang of Pricks?

Just when it seemed that America was on the brink of being forced into fiscal responsibility the Gang of Six rides into town and makes life safe again for government to live beyond our means.

The Gang of Sicks

Reason provides what is largely missing from Washington DC:

Yesterday, the so-called Gang of Six—a cadre of Republican and Democratic Senators working independently from the administration and Congressional leadership—released a proposal to reduce the projected federal deficit by $3.7 trillion over the next decade. According to The Washington Post, it “requires lawmakers in the coming months to cut agency spending, overhaul Social Security and Medicare, and rewrite the tax code to generate more than $1 trillion in fresh revenue.” It’s so…so…bipartisan. But maybe not in an entirely good way.

In a nice overview of the plan, Cato’s Dan Mitchell points out that, as usual, the headline deficit reduction figures don’t represent real reductions from current spending levels; instead, they’re cuts from projected growth. There are a few things to like about the plan, however, including its reduction of both the top personal and corporate tax rates and its obliteration of the CLASS Act.

But many of the particulars are still vague, especially when it comes to health care. Despite what the Post suggests, there is no major overhaul of Medicare. The plan calls for $200 billion in overall health care savings, but from where? We don’t yet know.

Call us crazy but we get a bit leery when a plan to “increase revenue” and cut spending can’t pinpoint where exactly those spending cuts are going to be. Because we all know where the revenue increases are coming from. Our paychecks.

– Written by Kip Hooker at TheVitaminPress.com

Source: Reason.com

This post was last modified on January 31, 2021

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View Comments (51)

  • CUT FUNDING BY 20% OR ABOLISH
    Dept of Ed., States issue, abolish
    Dept. of Interior, States issue, abolish
    Drug Enforcement Agency, abolish
    Environmental Protection Agency, abolish
    Internal Revenue Service, abolish
    Food and Drug Adm., cut 20%
    Dept. Homeland Security, abolish
    Transportation Safety Adm., abolish
    Federal Trade Commission, cut 20%
    Federal Bureau of Investigation, cut 20%
    Dept. of Labor, abolish
    Dept. of Agriculture, abolish
    Dept. of Health and Human Serv., abolish
    Dept. of Transportation, abolish
    Dept. of Energy, abolish
    Dept. of Commerce, abolish
    etc, etc, etc

    Remove ourselves from the U.N and NATO
    Charge for the defense of ALL allies, save Britain and Israel.
    Privatize Social Security.
    END THE WELFARE AND MEDICARE SYSTEMS!!
    Basically create a permanent and impenetrable wall of separation between Government and economy/business.

    • Its hard for me to imagine or even wrap my head around what our country would look like with out all of these deptartments. What would be the outcome if all these were abolished or cut by 20%? What would our country look like or be like? Its not that I dont agree, actually I think the FDA should recieve a nice 50% cut back, but these deptartments have been around for so long I cant even begin to imagine an America without them. What would the picture look like?

      • The IRS could be trimmed, no, removed. Flat tax form for everybody making any money. A few hundred people and a decent network could handle that. The treasury could be afloat in a sea of cash with a flat rate in the 10 to 17 percent range.

      • Let's take the FAA as an example. They are shut down right now. There was a spending dispute, they were not given authority to tax, and had to shut down all but air traffic controllers.

        Nobody has noticed (except for lower airfares).

        If there was ever an agency that we'd need, in theory, it'd be the one that keeps airplanes safe. Yet, there they are, all on furlough, and there we are, not noticing.

        How can this be, you might ask?

        Well, in most smaller governments, periodic budget adjustments mean that they have to let departments go, and wind up over time focusing on their core priorities. Federal agencies, on the other hand, have never had to do that, and the number of redundant employees is just plain ridiculous. They've never had to update their IT infrastructure -- it's 1950 all over again in most departments.

        So, a few years ago, when there was a snowstorm, and few bureaucrats could make it to work in DC, again, nobody noticed.

        I'm not an anarchist, but I figure that if an agency is shut down for an extended period and nobody notices, only a damn fool would continue to fund it. It is just another form of welfare -- just for bureaucrats.

        • Our government's greatest fear, and their greatest danger (in their perspective) is that we will notice that we don't notice their absence.

          All of those little bureaucratic empires and fiefdoms would then come crashing to the ground in a flurry of tax and legislative burden reductions.

          We have an EPA that doesn't care about the environment, a department of energy that hinders energy production, a department of education that has presided over the largest decline in education in world history. I could go on and on.

          Our government is harder on the people of this nation than a H-bomb. It just won't go away, and keeps on doing damage.

          This is why I want the gov't to shut down next month.

          • Thank you Perlcat! I see what you mean now. Its just hard or mind boggling to see all the government dept. that we dont need and to imagine our country without them is even harder for me since its always been that way ever sinced I can remember. But it is clear to me now just what would happen with out these agencies and depts. I also hope that the goverment shuts down and that it will be enough of an extended time for people of this country to see that they really dont need as much government as we have now. Hopefully it will spawn a change and a reversal of alot of current crap regulations. Of course alot of people these days are government employees who may notice and not like it so much. I wonder how they will enjoy their unemployment crisis? :)

          • I bet they'll enjoy it just as much as the people in the private sector who lost their jobs no thanks to government intervention.

          • To add a simple example to what perlcat said, This country was built by people with an 8th grade education in a time before the Dept. of Ed. existed. If we can create a nation that strong and that prosperous with Jr. high students and none of the Dept.s that I mentioned in my earlier comment, why is it so difficult to imagine going back to that status? We are currently destroying that great country with the leadership of Harvard Grads.

            I'll take the 8th graders, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!

      • Sorry it took so long to add this, but...

        Let's compare the Federal Government to an individual human.

        By my reasoning, that human would be a deaf, dumb and blind quadriplegic.

      • Yeah, I realized that the moment I hit the submit button. What is so shameful, to me, is that I am such a HUGE firearms fanatic and you would think that the BATFE would have been first on my list. At least I added etc, etc, etc, hoping that the reader would add his/her own personal peeves to the list.

  • I'm thinking that in the next day or two there will be some sort of compromise to allow everyone on the inside (and those of us paying attention) one more chance to load up on gold. I hope anyway.

    • I'm already there. Buying silver. Gold's nice, but If I'm hungry, I want food, not a house at a bargain price.

      Not an ETF, though. That is going to hit the fan real soon, when people want to get their specie, and find out that they've been paying for the physical storage of air.

      • Central bank's don't F with silver. If there's a controlled collapse (last 10 years) gold will win. If there's a zombie appocalypse, silver's OK for trading. But bullets will be too.

      • Even better is the fact that the US Mint has been "selling" the new Presidentialdollar coins online, and people have been buying them by the 10s of thousands of dollars with their credit cards to get free airline miles and other rewards. The Mint has been offering free shipping to boot!
        These people then deposit the coins in their bank accounts,and pay the bill when it comes in! No interest, no expense to them!
        The Mint has stopped this as of this past Friday.
        http://schnittshow.com/main.html
        Podcast area on right of page, 7-22-11, 3rd hour.
        It's the first segment, so you don't have to listen to the whole hour if you don't want to.

  • I vote for gang of pricks. Pricks have a head and I doubt these six have a single head among them. It is without a doubt that they don’t have a single brain among them.

  • Our government is not working for us anymore. Only a few of the Gang of 535 aren't puppets to the globalists. The divisive partisan drama that plays on the governmedia to keep the people distracted, not to mention the distractions like the Baby Murderer trial et al, keeps them from looking behind the curtain to see who is really yanking us around.

    Do you recall what George W. Bush’s final deficit was? It was loudly decried as a “record-breaking” figure in the governmedia, and it was indeed far too high. The amount was about $458 billion. Barack Obama racks up that much debt every three months. What sort of political “courage” can be found in a deal that trims a few hundred billion a year, and still leaves him with double the “record-breaking” deficits of his predecessor?

    There are a few seemingly respectable people in the Gang of 535, but only a few. This link - http://biggovernment.com/awilliams/2011/07/23/rep-allen-west-says-marxist-now-who-else-will-tell-the-truth/#more-301208 - talks about a recent event we all know about. It is definitely worth reading and going through the internal links it provides. Truly astonishing.

  • HEY ASSHAT! Yeah, you, the talking head! Give me the F-ing budget. I'll cut it to the bone, still leave "entitlements" roughly intact, NOT raise "revenues", and still balance the damn budget. $1.6 Trillion? That's the best you can do??? You are telling me you can't find more programs like studying the size of gay men's penises? You cannot raise "revenues" until you TRY to cut spending first. Give me a GD break!

    • First, completely cut out foreign aid.
      Second, get out of the UN, kick them out of the country, and sell the building!
      Third, cut out ALL the pork projects.
      Then we can look at what is left, item by item. Starting with all non essential departments. How do we decide which those are? Easy, if the Fed shut them down last time we didn't have a budget, then they are non essential.

      • Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the U.N. sits on its own land
        (seperate from the U.S.) but we can certainly make it harder on them to get there, end their immunity (i.e. speeding and parking tickets that get fixed) and we can stop providing for their security.

  • This proposal probably won't get anywhere in the House and there are not 60 votes in the Senate. What is a problem is that the Go6 opened the genie bottle of reducing home mortgage interest deduction and other tax breaks. They are also proposing reducing top tier taxes rates. The concern, to me, if this were to pass is that later another Congress will come along and raise taxes but not reopen those deductions. Think about Reagan's cuts. Top tier down to 28% but interest on credit cards, for example, was eliminated. Years later Clinton raises top tier to 39% and the old tax breaks were left closed.

    • Sidekick, really good points. You've highlighted what is essentially bad about any tax. No matter how benign it may seem at first, it always gets increased, by hiking the marginal rates or as you point out, by not reinstating deductions or credits that were previously discontinued in tandem with a reduction in marginal rates. Government and the ruling elite that operate within are addicted to this revenue. In the real world, where business owners have to actually perform a service or manufacture a product for their revenue, it's quite different. The public demands the service or product to be available and of a certain quality and if it isn't forthcoming, guess what, the business man gets no revenue. Government agencies can squander huge amounts of money for decades with no consequences.

      • And they do squander money. I've seen it first hand for years, and what I see is just a teeny tiny pinpoint tip of the iceburg.....

    • With mortgage rates being what they are these days, that deduction is largely unavailable to most of us unless we bought a McMansion.
      We got such a great deal on out house, and great rate on the mortgage, that we can't itemize! Though, there is a bonus to that, simple tax forms!

  • I did notice the gang of 6 managed to target every single remaining tax write off I now enjoy. Gee, I guess 48 f-cking percent of my take home pay JUST IS NOT ENOUGH!

    • You're only paying out 48% in taxes? You must have one hell of an accountant. Or maybe you don't live in California.

    • As Algore once asked "What makes you think it is your money? Your name isn't on it!" Okay, maybe that is a little too clever to have been Algore. Might have been my boss 20 years ago.

  • Uhh guys...that was the 2009 Gang of Six from the health care bickerings. You're looking for the 2011 debt bickerings gang. Dems Warner, Durbin and Conrad plus Republicans Chambliss, Coburn, and Crapo.

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