http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-statebudget-fl,0,95571.htmlstory
Cut everything, don’t raise taxes.You get an $11 billion dollar surplus, allowing you to pay off any outstanding government debt or just cut taxes. Of course, I doubt that proposal would be met with much praise from the Sunshine State.
I managed to cut it to 741 million, but there’s not enough options (that are principled) to eliminate it entirely.
Pensions and benefits for retired government parasites are huge. I also noticed a couple of items that seemed inordinately large considering the number of recipients. Like 440,000 folks getting home health but it costs several hundred million to do this?
I’m reminded of when I had to get a copy of some public records from the city. I had to get the file from one office, go to another office to have copies made, then go to a third office to pay for it. Three tax-eaters, doing the job of one.
Well, isn’t that division-of-labor ? =P
haha, the state in reverse, multiplication of labour ! i like it juan.
I had always thought the division of labor could be “over-rationalized” via the state in “over-specialization”, which occurs anywhere between government bureaucracy (3 people to do one job, as mentioned above), to over-specialized academic credentials. In some cases, I can easily see statists using the division of labor to rationalize the existence & “necessity” of the state itself.
I think it is also an effective means to isolate individuals in state-society to only certain spheres of influence or society, & can help prevent them from seeing the whole of state-society, thus, making them reliant upon government to fill in the blanks (which might explain the blank expressions I sometimes get when I try & explain how we could really just use markets instead of government, as if the concept is another language).
Often, it seems to me that over-specialization, the “multiplication of labor” & bureaucracy are linked. It would make for an interesting study, no doubt.
Speaking of the Division of Labor, which Economist came up with that theory? Was it Adam Smith?
What are the libertarian arguments for those “left in the streets” due to the budget cuts? I side with you in cutting everything, but by the same token, when I tell my liberal friends my stance, I got bombarded with cries of helping those less fortunate.
Just cut everything but much more than what they allow. The solution is ALWAYS to cut spending and taxes and to reduce the size of government.
Actually, no. Plato mentioned the concept in everything but name as early when he wrote The Republic:
I think William Petty & Bernard Manderville were the first economist’s to use the concept, though. I would’ve thought that a Physiocrat would’ve used the concept earlier than those two, though.
What you need to do is to completely restructure the Californian government. Eliminate all regulations, taxes, and spending. Then, reimpose taxes in order to extract a maximum of $1000 per year from each Californian resident. This could easily be done by imposing low sales taxes on certain “sin” goods and services (e.g. alcohol, tobacco, prostitution, marijuana, etc.). Then, fund the absolute basics of government with this. If you paid each government employee $60,000 a year, you could hire 612,611 Californians, or 1.67% of the population. I am sure this is enough to fund courts and state police. The rest of government duties should go to individual counties and cities.
First of all, it makes no sense to centralize power in the state capital. Counties and cities should have more power. I’m sure your leftist friends would be pleased that local rule is much more democratic than long-distance rule.
Secondly, the poor would overwhelmingly benefit from higher wages, lower prices, and more jobs from such a plan. Less government spending would mean that resources would not be outbidded from private companies which could hire more workers more efficiently than government. No deficits would not drain liquidity away from private businesses, which would allow for higher wages and more productivity growth as private businesses could invest more. Much lower taxes would mean that the poor would have more take home pay and would pay lower prices due to less/no sales taxes. Lastly, no regulations would greatly increase supply, make it easier for the poor to start a business, and lower prices across the board. Health prices would plummet as state-imposed health care requirements decreased.
Are you kidding? Without the State, the poor would stack up in the streets like so much cordwood!
That was fun. [:)]
I agree with what J. Russell Wagner said.
The $10,949,000,000 surplus would put the money into the pockets of people owed the money, and get rid of interest payments, spuring the economy. Granted, if we could abolish the Federal Reserve (inflation tax), the IRS (Federal Income Taxes) and all government regulation (allowing for cheaper, more effective alternatives to take over) the result would be more economic growth and prosperity for the entire state.
You and your leftist friends have been grossly misinformed.
I’d suggest reading Dr. Ruwart Healing our World (the free version The Other Piece of the Puzzle is available for free online). I’d also recommend Harry Browne’s Why Government Doesn’t Work and Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.
When the government runs a deficit, the result is inflation because the government has to borrow the money (which, because of our Fraction Reserve system, creates about 10 times as much money as borrowed, resulting in inflation hurting the poor and middle class with higher costs of living. And it also pulls funds away from people with savings. This drain of capital makes investment more expensive and hinders economic growth, that could result in more jobs and charity for those same people who are supposidely “hurt” by the cuts in spending. Let the private industry take over this stuff, and allow things to be more effecient.
Just to clear things up, I understand the arguments for a libertarian law and austrian economics. The difficulty is in translating the ideas of what is found in the austrian/libertarian literature to something a little more palatable for other individuals. From my conversations that I have with my liberal friends, I sound like a broken record saying things like privatize, privatize, privatize or cuts, cuts, cuts.
Maybe you don’t know enough about it?
I’ve seen videos on youtube and the like from Shanedk giving pretty damn good evidence for the superiority of free markets.