On Thursday, newly arrived Kentucky senator Rand Paul submitted a bill in the Senate that deserves at least a modicum of scrutiny (which is more than it has so far received), if only as a sign of the kinds of thinking that are going around in tea-party circles. Mr Paul proposed to cut $500 billion out of the 2011 federal budget. He would accomplish this almost entirely through across-the-board flat-sum cuts to agency budgets, without specifying what the results of those cuts might be.
I think Mr Paul's proposal deserves to be assessed with the same level of detail and judiciousness with which he approached the proposal itself, or in fact rather more, so I started out taking a look at what percentage cuts he assigned to different government departments.
For the Defence Department, Mr Paul proposes to cut the budget (including war operations) by $64 billion, which based on current projected FY 2011 spending of $721 billion is a cut of less than 9%. How does that compare to, say, the State Department? Let's see:
SEC. 15. STATE.
(a) IN GENERAL.Including reductions made by subsection (b), amounts made available to the Department of State for fiscal year 2011 are reduced on a pro rata basis by the amount required to bring total reduction to $20,321,000,000.
To figure that in terms of percentages, let's take a look at the Department of State's FY 2011 budget justification.
The FY 2011 budget request for all Department of State appropriations totals $16.419 billion.
Okay, that must be the wrong figure. Giving Mr Paul the benefit of the doubt and assuming he is not trying to cut the State Department's budget by 125%, he must be referring to the combined budget for the State Department and USAID, which according to the president's February 2010 proposal would have totaled $52.8 billion. That would mean a cut of 38%.
...
And I really ought to stop there. But I won't! Because Mr Paul's bill just keeps getting more ridiculous the more you read of it. The more specific he tries to be, the more problems he creates for himself. For example, Section 12 (5):
(5) REPEAL.All accounts and programs of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are defunded effective on the date of enactment of this Act.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs' Office of Justice Services has primary responsibility for investigation of crimes that occur within Indian country, as Indian tribes are recognised as separate nations with treaty relationships with the United States government. About a quarter of the police and justice programmes in Indian country are run directly by the BIA, while the other three-quarters are partially or wholly funded by the BIA but run by the tribes themselves.
Mr Paul's plan leaves it unclear who would investigate crimes that occur on Indian territory, or who would run jails on Indian territory if the OJS's Bureau of Corrections were defunded.
...
SEC. 27. MISCELLANEOUS BUDGET SAVINGS.
The following programs shall be implemented or repealed in fiscal year 2011 with the savings provided:
(1) Collect delinquent taxes from Federal Employees, $3,000,000,000. ...
(7) Unused Federal assets shall be sold, $19,000,000,000.
Why not (8) A bake sale shall be held, $100,000,000,000? Can you seriously put this sort of stuff in federal legislation? You don't have to explain which "unused Federal assets" you're talking about, or which "assets" qualify as "unused"? And "Collect delinquent taxes from Federal Employees"? How about we collect delinquent taxes from everybody else, too? That'd net us somewhere in the neighbourhood of $345 billion, according to the IRS's most recent estimate, which was for the 2001 tax gap.
But maybe there's some reason why you can't just wave a magic wand and collect delinquent taxes. Like, maybe the people who are delinquent don't have the money in their bank accounts? Or maybe they have some due-process rights?
Mr Paul's bill won't get a vote, and there's no sign he ever intended it to be taken seriously. The question is why he pulls stunts like this, if he expects people to take him seriously.
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