Maastricht Treaty revisions needed?

[kandrathe]

But that's not waste - that's a conscious military decision, and its costs are the inevitable consequence.

I'll take that as "no". The question is to what extent we should project our power beyond our borders. Perhaps Europe is desensitized to seeing empires with warships, colonies, and bases all over the world, but it was a world view our nation sought to escape. Now ironically, we've become the empire. The US needs to back off, and let people take care of their own issues.

Yeah, lots of people have promised this. But there are two problems they invariably run in to. ... people who really don't need these programs but get benefits are dwarfed by the number who do... ...auditing to sort out the first from the second is a costly and unpopular process.

I agree there are problems, but not the two you cite. The problem is in politicians having a spine, and actually changing the systems to require people to apply for their handouts (where they would need to detail their assets and income). Any system where you give away money has the problem of fraud, and nothing changes here except the amount of cash you are handing out.

Perhaps there is some money to be saved by consolidation. But I doubt it is very much. It sounds ominous to list things like "400 international trade agreements", but I can't imagine how you'd consolidate them, at least without pushing some major global trading pact - they're negotiated with other countries.

The point was that 17 different agencies are working on the 400 trade agreements.

You could consolidate all the statistical agencies, but to what end? They measure different things for different people - putting them all under the same roof would just be pointless reorganization.

Why would corporate mergers ever save money? Of course consolidation would remove duplication and increase coordination of effort.

Everyone is always in favour of eliminating government waste, and everyone universally fails to do it. The cynic could, I suppose, argue that government simply corrupts everyone it touches before they can affect any real change. I think the answer is simpler: it's an easy political target (who wants waste?), but a very difficult economic one. There is simply not much money to be saved there, and attempts to do so inevitably fall short.

Our economy is in the toilet, and a record number of people are losing their homes, unemployed, and going bankrupt. The government doesn't have enough money to pay its bills, nor can it continue to borrow a trillion or so per year to keep up paying for all we spend. Not to mention, that all those trillions we borrowed will need to be paid back. I'd say it's time to justify every expenditure, and be very thoughtful about where our money is spent. Or, we might adopt your attitude and go the way of Greece.

Sure, if you want to devolve the overwhelming majority of government functions to the States, you could do that. Is there any evidence whatsoever that they would be accomplished more efficiently there? Or is this just an ideological change? It seems to contradict the logic of your argument above - how are you going to save money by multiplying every department and program by 50? That's a lot of de-consolidation!

Every State already has these departments, and the bulk of the work is done at this level. If you add up enough billions, you get to a trillion. Just the departments I cited would redirect 22 billion for the Department of Agriculture, 78 billion for the Department of Transportation, and 58.5 billion for the Department of Education. I wouldn't call it de-consolidation, so much as getting the federal fingers out of the states business.