Just for starters …

Statist Newsweek columnist -- oh dear, was that redundant? -- Robert Samuelson makes a claim in the Feb. 28 Review-Journal which is nothing new:

“On the right, we have conservatives clamoring for tax cuts when, as a practical matter, today’s massive budget deficits preclude permanent new tax cuts,” Mr. Samuelson writes. “Before reducing taxes, the tax cut advocates need to identify hundreds of billions of annual spending reductions -- or accept huge and hazardous annual deficits. Naturally, a comprehensive list of spending cuts is nowhere in sight.”

If Mr. Samuelson finds “a comprehensive list of spending cuts” to be “nowhere in sight,” please, someone, send him this partial list -- which I will keep “broad-brush” in an effort to keep this whole post under 850 words:

Though I oppose the maintenance of an overseas military empire, other than a Navy sufficient to keep our sea lanes free of pirates, let us for now steer clear of all military spending.

Likewise, for simplicity, let’s for purposes of this demonstration keep “hands off” the programs often identified as “General Government” -- interest on the debt, the Justice Department (though savings from repealing all unconstitutional drug laws and thus ending the “Drug War” should be substantial, and overdue), the State Department, the federal courts, stuff like that.

Except for BATFE and NASA. We do have to zero out Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (the Constitution bans any regulation of firearms or explosives, which is what they mostly do) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: NASA was set up to reach the moon, they got there 40 years ago, end of story.

Now: Our main list of cuts starts with everything generally identified as “Human Resources” -- not a lick of which is authorized in the Constitution.

Eliminate all Social Security payments: $544 billion per year. Eliminate all Medicare payments: $325 billion per year. Eliminate all Medicaid payments: $186 billion per year.

No “phasing out”; no “transferring of tasks”: repeal all laws that assign these departments, agencies, and supposed “trust funds” any tasks, funds, or duties whatsoever. Cut them all to zero within the next 60 days; end them. Savings: $1 trillion per year.

(What’s that? People were “promised” various benefits in exchange for decades of tax deductions? The answer is a simple 13 words. Memorize them; you’re going to be using them a lot whether you listen to me now or not: “Those were lies. They were told you by politicians. What are you, stupid?”)

Without government subsidies and the need to endlessly “negotiate” with the G-men, medical overhead and thus prices will fall. With huge tax cuts, people can afford to support themselves and pay for their own health care. All these programs and “trusts” will be broke and paying worthless I.O.U.s within 11 to 17 years, anyway. Why not get people ready for what’s coming? “Truth now.”

Next: eliminate whatever’s left of Health and Human Services; the federal Education Department (including all efforts to subsidize school breakfast and lunches -- government should have no role in education OR nutrition, which is why God gives children “parents”); Food stamps and other “nutrition” programs, the Food and Drug Administration; Housing and Urban Development; the Labor Department.

Additional savings: $789 billion per year.

Now the $117 billion-per-year “Physical Resources” budget, which includes the Department of Agrlculture (yes, we already zeroed out “food stamps,” above); Interior; Transportation; Homeland Security (which secures precisely nothing but violates the Constitution thousands of times per day -- replace it by mining the southern border and inviting all American citizens to carry their self-defense weapons openly on planes); Commerce; Energy; HUD (in case they try to shift it here from “Human Resources”); Environmental Protection; the National Science Foundation; the Army Corps of Engineers; the Federal Communications Commission, etc.

Add savings of $117 billion per year to our earlier savings of $1 trillion and $789 billion per year (2006 baseline) and you’ve just cut more than $1.9 trillion per year without ending a single function authorized under Article I Section 8 of the Constitution except possibly for “post roads.” We can debate how much the federal government should be spending on “post roads,” though I fail to see why we need a separate federal department to administer those funds.

(We had “post roads” in 1790 and in 1850; did we have a “federal Department of Transportation”?)

The lands administered by the “Department of the Interior”? Show me the bills of sale, approved by the “legislatures of the states in which the same shall be,” as required by the Constitution. You can’t, can you? Give the state capitals first dibs at preserving a few pretty sites; otherwise open all these lands to private homesteading immediately.

Mr. Samuelson is free to argue these proposed cuts are “excessive and absurd” -- I’m sure he would.

But he is not longer justified -- if he ever was -- in contending “a comprehensive list of spending cuts is nowhere in sight.”

What he really means is: “You can’t propose a list of cuts that I, a worshiper of giant government, won’t ridicule.” And that’s is a very different thing, isn’t it?