We’ve already discussed Ron Paul today, now let’s discuss his son. On Thursday, newly arrived Kentucky senator Rand Paul submitted a bill in the Senate that deserves at least a modicum of scrutiny (which is more than it has so far received), if only as a sign of the kinds of thinking that are going around in tea-party circles. Mr. Paul proposed to cut $500 billion out of the 2011 federal budget. He would accomplish this almost entirely through across-the-board flat-sum cuts to agency budgets, without specifying what the results of those cuts might be. I think Mr. Paul’s proposal deserves to be assessed with the same level of detail and judiciousness with which he approached the proposal itself, or in fact rather more, so I started out taking a look at what percentage cuts he assigned to different government departments.
For the Defense Department, Mr Paul proposes to cut the budget (including war operations) by $64 billion, which based on current projected FY 2011 spending of $721 billion is a cut of less than 9%. How does that compare to, say, the State Department? Let’s see:
SEC. 15. STATE.
(a) IN GENERAL.—Including reductions made by subsection (b), amounts made available to the Department of State for fiscal year 2011 are reduced on a pro rata basis by the amount required to bring total reduction to $20,321,000,000.