{"id":493,"date":"2011-06-21T20:45:21","date_gmt":"2011-06-22T01:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/?p=493"},"modified":"2011-06-21T20:48:10","modified_gmt":"2011-06-22T01:48:10","slug":"the-fraudwaste-panacea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/the-fraudwaste-panacea\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fraud\/Waste Panacea"},"content":{"rendered":"

I understand the sentiment behind these government fraud\/waste stunts<\/a>, but they do really annoy me for several reasons. First, they reinforce the notion that waste and fraud are rampant, thus making people even less confident about government and playing right into the right-wing narrative that government is useless. Second, and more importantly, it completely obscures the magnitude of the budget and the problem. It’s a joke<\/a>. Congratulations, you’ve stopped paying $125 a year for a website! That amount would also pay for the war in Afghanistan for a fraction of a second<\/a>. We’re talking an orders of magnitude difference here in terms of real budgetary impact.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Everybody wants to believe that we can cut taxes and reduce the deficit while not negatively impacting any programs by simply eliminating fraud and waste. Sorry, folks, but it doesn’t work that way. If you want to cut spending, you need to make tough choices. Most of the federal budget<\/a> is defense spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest. We aren’t spending hundreds of billions of dollars on websites for singing forest rangers. At the state level, over two thirds of the state budget is spending on K-12 education and health care for the poor and elderly in nursing homes. The expensive programs are the ones that people like, and cutting them has consequences.<\/p>\n

There’s fraud and waste in government, sure. But not enough to mean we don’t have to make the difficult decisions about programs that people value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I understand the sentiment behind these government fraud\/waste stunts, but they do really annoy me for several reasons. First, they reinforce the notion that waste and fraud are rampant, thus making people even less confident about government and playing right into the right-wing narrative that government is useless. Second, and more importantly, it completely obscures… Continue reading The Fraud\/Waste Panacea<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[66,163,164],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-budget","tag-fraud","tag-waste","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t