Liz Peek: Harris wants to grow our broken government. With Elon Musk, Trump is thinking outside the box
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris wants to hike taxes by trillions of dollars, which will without a doubt crush our sputtering economy.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has a better idea: lower taxes and take a machete to government spending. The former president, speaking recently at the Economics Club in New York, promised that if he wins in November, he will create a government efficiency commission to root out “fraud and improper payments” and that Elon Musk has agreed to head up the effort. Asking the smartest man on the planet to streamline our bloated, inefficient and unaccountable federal government – slated to spend $7 trillion next year – is the kind of out-of-the-box idea that helped Trump win in 2016 and could sway voters again this November.
Two-thirds of Americans think they pay too much in taxes. If they knew how much of their tax money was wasted or outright stolen, they might revolt. In 2022, some $47 billion of Medicare payments were found to be “improper,” while Congress has determined that as much as half a trillion dollars of COVID relief money was likely stolen. Billions are misspent each year on community grants that end up in wealthy communities, maintaining thousands of empty buildings owned by Uncle Sam or funding duplicative and useless federal programs.
There are currently, for instance, 43 job training programs across 9 federal agencies that cost taxpayers almost $20 billion per year. One study conducted in 2022 by the Department of Labor concluded that the programs provided zero benefit to workers. Unfortunately, legislators win credit for starting up new programs; no one is applauded for shutting one down.
A watchdog group called Citizens Against Government Waste has identified 543 specific expenditures across the federal bureaucracy that could be reduced or eliminated to save taxpayers “$402.3 billion in the first year and $4 trillion over five years.” There is, in short, plenty of low-hanging fruit.
Musk is all in, telling an audience recently, “If Trump wins, we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once in a lifetime deregulation & reduction in the size of the government.” He added: “America is going bankrupt extremely quickly. The interest payments on the national debt just exceeded the defense budget.”
Tesla’s founder is right. Though the liberal media has largely ignored the mountainous debt piled up under the Biden-Harris administration and the resulting ratings downgrade of our Treasury bonds, the damage done by unprecedented reckless spending is undeniable. Higher prices for groceries, cars and electricity brought on by too much money flooding the economy have cost every American family dearly. The high interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve to bring inflation down have made home ownership unaffordable for millions.
Vice Presidnt Harris is wrong: we don’t need more tax revenues. The government’s income, running at roughly 17% of GDP, is in line with historical norms. Our problem is with spending, which is running above 23% of GDP, higher than the historical average of 20%, and is unsustainable.
There is another dangerous aspect of out-of-control government spending; it creates enormous opportunity for theft, partisanship and outright waste.
When taxpayers hear that “Democrat stalwart” John Podesta, as the New York Times describes him, was handed $370 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act to fund green energy projects, they should be on high alert. The liberal media has jubilantly reported that much of the announced spending from the Biden Climate czar has gone to Republican-led districts, but really the handouts have largely landed in swing states like Arizona and North Carolina, which could decide this year’s election. Nothing like starting up an EV battery plant in Georgia to curry favor with local voters.
Our government is arguably broken. Last December, the Pentagon, which accounts for roughly half the government’s discretionary spending, failed its sixth annual audit in a row. The General Accountability Office (GAO) reported they could not accurately evaluate “at least 46 percent of the DoD’s total assets and at least 72 percent of the DoD’s total budgetary resources.”
Earlier this year, the Pentagon’s Inspector General reported that the U.S. had been unable to track more than $1 billion in weapons and military gear sent to Ukraine. Despite White House denials, many assume the high-tech matériel was stolen.
The federal government employs some 2, 250,000 civilians and about the same number of military personnel, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The vast majority of civilians are protected by civil service rules and regulations; in addition, some 750,000 workers belong to a union, the American Federation of Government Employees. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to fire anyone.
When the Veteran’s Administration became embroiled in scandal for having covered up unconscionable wait times and treating our veterans poorly, the Trump administration had to push through a law (VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act) to permit those responsible to be axed, much to the annoyance of pro-union advocates.
The federal Merit Systems Protection Board is charged with adjudicating terminations of civil servants. Its mission is to “promote an effective Federal workforce free of prohibited personnel practices.” In the last fiscal year, the agency, which has a budget of approximately $60 million, reviewed 4,572 cases. That is how many government workers were fired, out of millions.
Making the federal government more efficient and more effective is a Herculean task; many consider it impossible, but Elon Musk is keen to take it on. As David Malpass, former senior Treasury official in both the Reagan and Trump White Houses told me: “Musk defied the skeptics with SpaceX and Starlink through small daily successes that are changing the whole trajectory of the space age. Cutting waste can do the same if it captures the public’s admiration and triggers an upheaval in the big-government political establishment.”
What a win that would be – for Trump, for taxpayers and for the U.S.
Comments are closed.
