A Quote by Bill Ayers
Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
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OK, so $1 trillion is what it costs to run the federal government for one year. So this money's going to run through September of 2016. Half of the trillion dollars goes to defense spending and the Pentagon. The other half goes to domestic spending - everything from prisons to parks. So there's also about 74 billion in there that goes to the military operations that we have ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria.
It is my view that what is important is cutting government spending, however spending is financed. A so-called deficit is a disguised and hidden form of taxation. The real burden on the public is what government spends (and mandates others to spend). As I have said repeatedly, I would rather have government spend one trillion dollars with a deficit of a half a trillion than have government spend two trillion dollars with no deficit.
To develop drugs for people, we basically dismantle the system. In the lab, we look at things the size of a cell or two. We dismantle life into very small models.
If the U.S. Government was a company, the deficit would be $5 trillion because they would have to account by general accepted accounting principles. But actually they encourage government spending, reckless government spending, because the government can issue Treasury bills at extremely low interest rates.
We could curtail private spending by several trillion dollars a year without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. That would be more than enough to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and eliminate government indebtedness once and for all.
What would've happened, do you think, had the government not intervened in October 2008? The catastrophe to the economy would've been absolutely unbelievable. And yet classical economists say, "Oh, well, no, it would've adjusted perfectly happily, a few weeks of pain and then everything would've gone on as before, without a banking system left." And that's what makes it so maddening, that these bankers are back saying it was all the government's fault. The government saved their skins. It didn't want to, but it needed to save their skins in order to save the rest of us.
The federal government is far larger than the Founding Fathers ever intended it to be. We have racked up over $16 trillion of debt through wasteful spending, and it is time that we cut that waste and start reducing the size of our government.
Reagan said that government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem. And he was going to dismantle that government. Well, long story short, he failed to do that. He built up the military to a much greater status, more people in it, and actually more employees after the end of the Reagan administration. And, to achieve his objectives, he did some of the very same things that Trump is doing to achieve his. What Ronald Reagan really wanted to dismantle was the welfare state. And he had limited success in doing that.
The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.
No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works.
Let's pass a bill to cover the moon with yogurt that will cost $5 trillion today. And then let's pass a bill the next day to cancel that bill. We could save $5 trillion.
As the Pentagon makes plans for the largest troop rotation since World War II, I will work with the Armed Services Committee to help make this proposal a reality.
It is time for Congress to save the Postal Service, not dismantle it.
Sometime in the near future we'll have a vote on repealing Obamacare, essentially the same vote that we had in 2015. I would remind everyone that in that proposal there's a two-year delay, a two-year delay which would give us the opportunity to work out a complete replacement on a bipartisan basis with our Democratic friends.
President Obama's call for nearly a half-trillion dollars in more government stimulus when America has more than $14 trillion in debt is guided by his mistaken belief that we can spend our way to prosperity.
A respected health economist said that these plans would cost a trillion dollars more a year.
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