Your daily newspaper and your favorite news websites have been dominated recently by news about guns and gun control. Since the awful shootings at the Sandy Hook elementary school, where a heavily armed lunatic murdered more than two dozen children and adults, our political leaders have been talking a lot about firearms and what we can do to prevent another horrible massacre.
In an odd way, the opportunity to talk about guns must be a kind of welcome relief for our politicians, because the gun control debate lets each party retreat to safe, time-honored positions that appeal to their bases. Democrats understand that most of their voters will support attempts to license gun owners, register all weapons, and restrict or even ban ownership of “assault weapons” or other firearms. Republicans, on the other hand, know that their supporters will cheer vigorous defenses of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and stalwart opposition to overly zealous attempts to regulate gun ownership.
I suspect that all of the talk, talk, talk about guns is, in part, a means of distracting voters from other pressing issues. Members of Congress and the Obama Administration would rather stay snugly in their gun debate comfort zones than deal with the spending, tax, and budget deficit issues that have far more long-term significance for our country. With all the talk about guns, how much discussion of those core economic issues have you heard recently? When those issues are in the forefront, and feet are being held to the fire, there are no easy, pat answers and no rote appeals to political bases.
As terrible as the Sandy Hook shootings were, we shouldn’t let our political leaders divert our attention from the federal debt time bomb and other issues that are restraining our economy. Yesterday we received an unpleasant reminder of these problems when it was announced that gross domestic product dropped in the fourth quarter of last year. Imagine: our economy actually shrank during the hottest shopping season of the year. It’s time we remind Congress and the President of the paramount need to focus on the hard budget and economic issues, before our economy plunges into another recession.
Of course, it’s too much to expect that any political debate these days could be done at a reasonable decibel level, without yelling or over-the-top metaphors. Nevertheless, I thought the discussion (if you can call it that) itself said something about the selection of Ryan. Rather than arguing about whether the pick would help Romney politically in this state or with that constituency, the commentators were talking about something of actual substance — the budget, our debt problems, and how we deal with them. How refreshing it would be if this election actually involved consideration of those crucial, meat-and-potatoes issues, rather than phony, grossly overheated topics like whether the evil Bain Capital caused a woman to die of cancer!
We called it the butt belt. It was a machine linked to a canvas belt. You stood on a platform, slipped the belt around your keister or waist, and turned on the motor. The belt vibrated and you leaned back, letting the contraption shake your rump like crazy.
The GSA has been in the news lately, but not due to its selfless performance of its crucial bureaucratic mission. No, the GSA is in the news because the agency spent $822,000 — $822,000 — on its 2010 Western Regions Conference in Las Vegas. That included payments for upscale accommodations, commemorative coins, and $3,200 for a “mind reader,” among other indefensible expenditures. When an Inspector General’s report uncovered the gross waste, the GSA Administrator resigned. Now 
If you look at the GSA website, 
According to a federal database, the American embassy in Paris spent more than $8,300 on Dreams From My Father in French. Embassies in Indonesia, Turkey, and South Korea made similar purchases. The embassy in Egypt led the way, spending a whopping $37,000 on copies of Dreams From My Father. According to a State Department spokesman, diplomats “often use books to engage key audiences in discussions of foreign policy” and he notes that “[t]he structure and the presidency of the United States is an integral component of representing the United States overseas.” He says the books stock “information resource centers” that are located around the world and include books about U.S. culture, history and values, and that the State Department also provides “key library collections with books about the United States.”
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The Post story found that in recent years more than $400 million in HUD money has been spent on stalled or abandoned projects. In some cases, money was loaned and projects never got underway. Many of the people to whom money was given had no experience in construction or had questionable qualifications for getting the federal booty. The overall picture painted by the article suggests that our tax dollars were spent with little concern for how they would actually be used, and then with little attention to how they were actually being spent.
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Another interesting time and timing issue was raised when the President talked about a “failsafe” that would be part of his plan. The President stated: “But just to hold Washington — and to hold me — accountable and make sure that the debt burden continues to decline, my plan includes a debt failsafe. If, by 2014, our debt is not projected to fall as a share of the economy -– if we haven’t hit our targets, if Congress has failed to act -– then my plan will require us to come together and make up the additional savings with more spending cuts and more spending reductions in the tax code. That should be an incentive for us to act boldly now, instead of kicking our problems further down the road.”
ext said the tax code is “loaded up with spending on things like itemized deductions.” He agrees with “the goals of many of these deductions, from homeownership to charitable giving,” but “we can’t ignore the fact that they provide millionaires an average tax break of $75,000 but do nothing for the typical middle-class family that doesn’t itemize.” He then called for “limiting itemized deductions for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.”
I’m all for making the tax code simpler and fairer — but does anyone really think President Obama is well positioned to do so? His health care legislation is already producing volumes of regulations that are of breathtaking complexity. And this is not a President who has shied away from advocating tax breaks and incentives for causes that he agrees with — like green energy. A better course, I think, would be to get away from deductions altogether. I’d like to see an end to special tax treatment of donations to charitable and religious organizations and the non-profit political groups, right and left, whose vile advertising makes TV watching during the election season so revolting. Our tax policy should not encourage such groups.
How to do so? First, by reducing “wasteful subsidies and erroneous payments,” cutting “spending on prescription drugs by using Medicare’s purchasing power to drive greater efficiency and speed generic brands of medicine onto the market,” and working with governors “to demand more efficiency and accountability from Medicaid.” Next, the government will “change the way we pay for health care” with “new incentives for doctors and hospitals to prevent injuries and improve results.” Finally, “we will slow the growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts and consumers who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services that seniors need.” These initiatives, the President said, will save $500 billion over the next 12 years. And if those savings don’t materialize, “then this approach will give the independent commission the authority to make additional savings by further improving Medicare.”
The clear implication of that passage is that promising savings from eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” is not a serious approach to solving budget problems. Yet isn’t that all that the President’s health care approach does? Look again at the President’s proposed approach, and you’ll see plans to eliminate “wasteful subsidies and erroneous payments” (end waste), to demand more “efficiency and accountability from Medicaid” (prevent fraud), and to “improve results” while “reducing unnecessary spending” (avoid abuse). It’s as if the two parts of the speech were written by two different speechwriters — or as if President Obama thinks that, just because he is the one making the proposal, the tired “waste, fraud and abuse” mantra has actual validity this time.
There are some politicians who seem to resist every effort to streamline the defense budget or cut any weapons program. In my view, we cannot afford that attitude. According to a 
The nature of our military capabilities also has had an impact, I think, on our willingness to engage in some form of military action. We have unmanned Predator drones and missiles that can inflict havoc from far away and planes that can help to discipline the outgunned ground forces of dictators like Qaddafi from a (usually) safe distance. When you are the President and have such capabilities at the ready, isn’t it awfully tempting to agree to participate to some extent in the latest UN peacekeeping mission to help burnish your international rep, or to just lob a few cruise missiles at the distant bases of terrorist organizations and call it a day?
The first part of the plan deals with domestic spending. The President’s description of this part is found in a paragraph that reads:
My guess is that most Americans would say that, given our current federal budget deficit and debt issues, the Department of Interior can safely do without someone to set up and supervise a Facebook page. The fact that the opening is even being advertised for filling suggests that the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. really aren’t serious about belt-tightening and holding down spending. The President should instruct all federal agencies to cut their payrolls and consider carefully whether new hires and replacements really are necessary — and if there is any doubt, the new hire shouldn’t be made.
