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1. “excess professorial research in the humanities”

   1. What would that be?
   2. Why not the social sciences? Econ departments spring to mind.

   — Pudentilla · Apr 17, 10:42 AM · #

2. Raise the social security retirement age.

   — Tony Comstock · Apr 17, 11:11 AM · #

3. Not saying it’s politically feasible, but apart from ending the drug war I’d:

   Cut defense, agriculture subsidies, and kill the Department of Education

   I link to a useful chart there, if you’re interested.

   — Gherald L · Apr 17, 10:10 PM · #

4. Andrew Sullivan’s unfounded claim that the tea party protests had no “constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending” is ironic, because many of them protested a specific spending program: the $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy “in the long run.”

   The “tea party” protests against out-of-control government spending have been very clear in identifying what wasteful spending they object to. One example is the stimulus package, which Obama falsely sold to the public as needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” but which the CBO repeatedly pointed out would actually cut the size of the economy “in the long run.” Many protests expressly targeted the stimulus package. See the links at my Openmarket blog post, “Slandering the Tea Parties.”

   Another example is the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (see the “I can’t afford your mortgage” sign at the Olathe tea party, for example).

   For having the temerity to protest broken promises (like Obama’s claim that he would enact a “net spending cut,” see my blog post entitled “Blind to Obama’s Broken Promises”) and out-of-control spending, the protesters have been called “despicable” by a liberal Congresswoman, and attacked in the left-wing blogosphere in the most vicious language as “redneck, racist Republicons” and as “a bunch of white old people and rednecks” who “got together and tried to start a revolution…to drive the Fascist/Communist n****r out of the White House and stop the f**s from stealing their children.”

   As a Harvard-educated, arugula-eating, urban dweller whose office hosted the end of the Washington tea party, I find these claims baffling. I am certainly not afraid of my Asian, black, and Hispanic relatives, my French-born wife, or the gay neighbor whose children play with my daughter.

   Andrew Sullivan derides the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s.”

   I did too make “serious objections to George W. Bush’s” spending plans. I condemned his costly prescription-drug entitlement (which Sullivan himself predicts will add $32 trillion to the national debt) in the Washington Times, and repeatedly condemned the $160 billion Bush “stimulus rebates” in 2008. I publicly called his $700 billion Wall Street “bailout bill dangerous, inflationary, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” And I condemned his multibillion dollar auto bailout.

   And contrary to Sullivan’s claims, I do indeed have a “constructive and specific argument about how . . . to reduce spending and debt and borrowing” — cancel the wasteful $800 billion stimulus package, most of which has not been spent yet, and may cause inflation when it finally is.

   — Hans Bader · Apr 18, 05:07 PM · #

5. How is abolishing public employee unions a “cost saving.” It’s actually an infringement on those employees’ rights to organize. Why not take away their First Amendment rights also, and those annoying whistleblower laws. A pity you can’t distinguish between authoritarianism and economics. Most of the the other stuff makes sense…..you can add enormously expensive weapon systems that don’t work to the military list.

   — John · Apr 20, 01:16 PM · #

6. Hi Conor,

   Definitely we need to cut the phat and death out of the military budget.

   We spend more on military than the rest of the nations COMBINED .

   — Dredd · Apr 20, 01:36 PM · #

7. Those curious as to what is available to cut might find this graphic of Obama’s proposed budget of much interest: http://tr.im/iVfK

   — Lukas T · Apr 20, 01:44 PM · #

8. Some good suggestions, but I’m wondering what you’re smoking if you think that cutting research funding in the humanities would have any impact on the budget. Humanities research is infinitely cheaper than the research in the sciences and the social sciences. Not only that, but it’s not research that keeps university faculty out of the undergraduate classroom: it’s the proliferation of Ph.D. programs which enable universities to use their cheap graduate student labor to teach undergrads while the professors get to teach graduate students (which many faculty members prefer because the burden of the classroom experience falls far more upon the grad student than the professor, and because the courses are more specialized). I teach at a liberal arts school with no graduate assistants, and I actually prefer teaching undergrads. But the notion that the piddling amounts spent on research in the humanities (the lowest paid faculty at any public university), is laughable. If you really want to make wise spending choices in public universities: eliminate the administration of any of these schools by 30% (it’s a farse how useless most of their work is, and the proportion of administrators to faculty members has increased astronomically in the past 30 years—with not positive impact on learning), eliminate Ph.D. programs in any field that isn’t ranked in the top 10 in its field (there are a glut of Ph.D.‘s in humanities with no jobs for them when they come out, so it does them no good to persuade them to waste money coming to a third rate program), and take the money you save from firing administrators and put it to work hiring more full-time faculty who are required to devote their teaching to undergraduates. Everyone would be happier in the end.

   — Craig P in KC · Apr 20, 01:55 PM · #

9. Good ideas, but maybe you are spitting out some of them a little fast Conor. Public universities are funded by states, or privately funded. I am not sure how you would cut back on a federal level. A better idea might be to tailor federal student aid grants and loans to majors that make us more globally competitive. If you want a student loan to become an engineer, you get it. If you want to get a Phd. in Anthropology, do it on your own dime. That being said, this whole discussion is more about education and values, not the budget. You could probably give every humanities Phd in the country lifetime tenure for the cost of the F-22 fighter program. Scaling back on the humanities or higher ed will start a nice fat culture war, but not exactly solve the budget crisis. And I think you can improve government efficiency in other ways besides “abolishing unions”. People do have a right to organize, right? Government needs to push back against unions, just like private companies have to. Negotiated compromises are always better than draconian laws that take away rights….

   — Mark J. · Apr 20, 06:14 PM · #

10. Hans,

    While I am sure that everyone who participated in the Tea Parties is against the stimulus package, there certainly wasn’t any cohesive message like that presented to the world. Many of my relatives were all into the Tea Parties, and I couldn’t find any sort of focused message in their e-mail screeds, nor could I find it by looking at the protests on TV. Mostly, there was a general anti-tax protest, which doesn’t make much sense if you are screaming about deficits (cutting taxes would only increase the deficit) and lot of very visceral hatred towards Obama – calling him a socialist, communist, “king”, etc. And then was the very laughable off-message idea that this hodge-podge of concerns has anything to do with “taxation with representation”, which was THE message of our founding fathers when they dumped tea in Boston.

    I don’t understand why modern tea-party protesters couldn’t have had the same message discipline that they had in 1773. it should have just been a protest against one issue: deficit spending. Instead it was a big clownish mess, hi-jacked by some REALLY dubious people…

    — Mark J. · Apr 20, 06:26 PM · #

11. Pretty much all spending areas are politically difficult to cut: even areas that really benefit only a minority of Americans: pork, special interest tax loopholes and subsidies (eg. farm subsidies). The problem is that if we can’t even cut in these areas which are definitely clearly not enough, I don’t know how we’ll cut the real big spenders which are Social Security, Defense and Medicare/Medicaid. Is it politically feasible to tell baby boomers to wait a few more years to collect social security? Will congress agree to cut defense when we’re fighting 2 wars and a “war on terror”? Can we say to seniors (a dependable voting block) that we’re no longer paying for their prescription drugs? More importantly, cutting the federal budget means cutting jobs: health care workers, defense contractors,… – this adds to the political challenge. It’s great that you’re offering a serious discussion about cuts, although I’d prefer if you’d added a graphic showing how your suggested cuts would actually impact the budget.

    — Elisa A · Apr 20, 06:28 PM · #

12. I like a lot of these suggestions…
    kill agriculture subsidies
    raise the retirement age
    raise the required number of years worked to collect social security
    follow through with the Gates plan for pentagon spending
    kill the drug war
    stick with waging only defensive wars
    no more foreign aid to countries specifically to buy our weapons systems
    allow the government to negotiate drug prices
    means test medicare
    eliminate those Phd programs (as suggested above)

    — Z · Apr 20, 07:50 PM · #

13. I think if you cut:

    1. foreign wars of choice
    2. irrelevant military systems like attack submarines
    3. the drug war (don’t even really have to legalize, just stop the aggressive/foreign prosecution of it, though I’d prefer legalization)
    4. direct agri/corp subsidies

    …you’d be doing pretty well for yourselves. Not particularly crazy unpopular either, support for legalization seems to be up, foreign war support is down, and everyone would get behind cutting subsidies if you sold like “screwing those evil corporations!”

    — Brian Moore · Apr 20, 09:05 PM · #

14. I love the paragraph … “My tentative nominee’s”. Heh,heh,heh … “the few, the proud….the moneymaker’s” :)

    — ranch chimp · Apr 25, 01:02 PM · #

15. I like your “Tentative Nominee’s” :)

    — ranch chimp · Apr 25, 01:08 PM · #

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