Trump’s Budget Asks the Right Questions for Conservatives
While America’s libertarian streak is often wildly exaggerated, this much is not: most people don’t like the idea of a government that runs a zillion programs they have never heard of, to help some special interest they’ll never meet, and which have little accountability for actually generating results. This structure is a recipe for a lot of such programs.
.. the 1986 Reagan tax reform, widely viewed as a model for those who want to broaden the tax base: rather than trying to tidy up the wild proliferation of tax exemptions that had grown up since the inception of the federal income tax, they went after all of it at once. In the resulting melee, there was simply not enough bandwidth for all the lobbies to make their case; congressmen have only so many hours in the day.
.. while there is a coherent conservative argument to be made for many of these cuts, I would not go so far as to say that the budget as a whole has a coherent conservative logic.
.. While I am probably friendlier than most libertarians to high levels of military spending, I do not see a pressing need to make them higher still.
.. Some of the EPA cuts look like ideological warfare more than a carefully-thought-out program of agency reform
.. This is the sort of thing that the federal government should be doing, because there are great economic benefits in having national standards for companies that operate across state lines, and great economies of scale in developing this sort of research and expertise once, rather than trying to duplicate them fifty times. Similar arguments hold for scientific research, controlling pollution (no respecters of state lines), and space exploration. These things have a clear goal, that goal is worthwhile, and it is best achieved at the federal level. Conservatives should be no happier than liberals if they go.
.. it isn’t really a small government budget; it’s just a poke in the eye to blue states.