…rots on:
“Anything that gets done by Washington must be done by the civil service. These folks are lifers. You can’t fire them. Because of the abovementioned legislative compromises required, you also can’t push a bill through that will let you fire them. And they — not the president, and not the cabinet secretaries — are the folks who do most of what government does. The president can wave his hands like Jean-Luc Picard and say, ‘Make it so.’ But if they don’t wanna, they ain’t gonna.”
This should be infuriating to anyone who actually believes in democratic governance, but on the other hand, since most political ideas are half-baked, anything that slows them down is probably a good idea.
But what happened in the IRS scandal wasn’t a case of bureaucrats slow-walking ideas they think are dumb. It was, instead, a case of bureaucrats targeting people because of their political views.
Yup.
BTW, it’s not totally impossible to rein in the bureaucracy. The next president would end federal public-employee unions wiht the stroke of a pen.
“BTW, it’s not totally impossible to rein in the bureaucracy. The next president would end federal public-employee unions wiht the stroke of a pen.”
Not at all impossible by any means. Your idea is idea #1.
But close by is the elimination of entire departments:
Get rid of the IRS and the IRS no longer makes it’s own rules.
Same with the EPA – eliminate that department and you wipe out one of the hugest drags on the economy.
Just do those three things and the economy will love it and skyrocket the very next day.
I’m skeptical that we can completely eliminate the IRS. But a thousand-fold reduction in the complexity of the federal tax code, and attendant reduction of executive staff and potential for abuse, should be possible with the right Congress.
There’s the “for show” government and there’s the real one. The “for show” government consists of the 537 elected politicians in DC. The real government consists of the millions of modern day Mandarins who work in the alphabet soup of the federal bureaucracy. They’re unelected, unresponsive, unaccountable, and largely untouchable. They impose thousands of new regulations each year under the guise of administrative law. The only thing the “for show” government can do is to cut the bureaucracy’s budget but there is very little political will to do so.
And a whole new generation (or so) of naive folks have learned from Bernie that only solution is to multiply the bureaucracy even more.
Because of course, It Shows You Care.