Maastricht Treaty revisions needed?

[kandrathe]

As Pete has already pointed out, the amount of money wasted on pointless government spending is really quite small. The largest chunks of the budget are spent where they are for obvious reasons, on perfectly justifiable things: The military. Health care. Social security payments. Debt service. You can't stop making those payments without breaking contracts, or cutting back on the military in wartime. This is not the "clueless congressman" with a "shotgun approach". These are obvious expenses that exist for perfectly coherent reasons. The amount of money spent on wacky random crap is, at most, a few percent. If you killed every last pork earmark, the US fiscal situation would not look noticeably different.

Sometimes its called earmarks, sometimes its called pork, but mostly its business as usual. Can you tell me why we need 737 military bases around the world? Then we can begin to dismantle much of the social spending for those who are able to take care of themselves (including health insurance, social security, and tax breaks). Then we can look to consolidating the duplication; at just the federal level we have 342 economic development programs; 130 programs serving the disabled; 130 programs serving at-risk youth; 90 early childhood development programs; 75 programs funding international education, cultural, and training exchange activities; 72 federal programs dedicated to assuring safe water; 50 homeless assistance programs; 45 federal agencies conducting federal criminal investigations; 40 separate employment and training programs; 28 rural development programs; 27 teen pregnancy programs; 26 small, extraneous K-12 school grant programs; 23 agencies providing aid to the former Soviet republics; 19 programs fighting substance abuse; 17 rural water and waste-water programs in eight agencies; 17 trade agencies monitoring 400 international trade agreements; 12 food safety agencies; 11 principal statistics agencies; and 4 overlapping land management agencies. We could slash departments wholesale that are mostly handled at the state level, such as the department of education, department of agriculture, department of transportation, etc.