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A lot of people get annoyed with Austrian economists because they tend to be so dogmatic (we prefer the term consistent) and because they cloak their strictly economic claims with self-righteousness (we prefer the term morality). After a good Austrian bashing of the latest call to steal taxpayer money and waste it on something that will make a given problem worse, the stumped critics will often shout, "Oh yeah? Well do you guys have a better idea?"
Now, in truth, someone doesn't have to have a better suggestion in order to point out that a recommended strategy will exacerbate the situation. If an allergic man has been stung by a bee, I don't know what to do except rush him to the hospital and maybe scour the cupboards looking for Benadryl. But I'm pretty sure drawing blood from his leg, in order to inject it into his arm and thus "stimulate his immune system," is a bad idea on numerous accounts not least of which, is that I'm pretty sure an allergic reaction means your immune system needs to calm down. But the point is, if a bunch of guys hold the man down he has to be forced to endure the procedure for his own good, don't you know I feel perfectly qualified in yelling, "Stop!"
LOL! The Austrians sat back and let Hitler ream them up the rear, how'd that work out for them?
There's really not much reason to respond to a group that calls for blowing up government buildings. These people are idiots.
Mises isnt exactly non biased , its a libertarian think tank.
Eliminate the personal and corporate income tax. Don't put in a flat tax or a fair tax or a VAT or any other cute name for a very uncute process. To make sure that individuals and corporations realize you are serious, blow up the IRS building. (Have everyone vacate the premises first, of course.) Tell all of the displaced workers that they have 9 months of full pay, plus whatever pension and health-care benefits they had contractually earned to that point. If the workers get new jobs 3 days after being laid off from the IRS, that's fine; they still get their full 9 months' pay. But if they haven't found a new job after 9 months, tough.
Unfortunately, dismantling the Social Security system will have to wait. (That means some of the IRS personnel would sigh have to be retained. But they would move to a different building.) Getting rid of the income tax will knock out much of the federal revenues, and taking out all payroll "contributions" would take us into the realm of "unserious." Note that in 2007, even without the personal and corporate income tax, the federal government still took in more than $1 trillion in receipts.
The loss of some $1.5 trillion in annual tax receipts sounds absurd, but the actual figure would be lower, because of "supply-side" effects. That is, the true stimulus to the economy from such an enormous tax cut would cause the revenues from other sources to grow. So long as the federal budget were cut by, say, a trillion dollars, within a few years it would be in the black.
Eliminate(ed) the personal and corporate income tax.
[*]Reducing annual federal expenditures by $1 trillion sounds inconceivable, but it actually could be phased in. The government has many assets that it could auction off into private hands, so that in the first year or two, the government could take certain programs and say, "This will have its budget cut by one-third over each of the next three years." The auction receipts would fill the gap until these phased-in reductions had fully occurred. Some of the obvious auction items would be the oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (current value of about $35 billion at $50/bbl oil), as well as all of the mineral deposits (both onshore and offshore) technically owned by the federal government. It is difficult to come up with an estimate of how much the latter properties would fetch in an auction, since the proposals right now are for leasing extraction rights. But since the Outer Continental Shelf is estimated to have some 86 billion barrels of oil, presumably the government could receive many hundreds of billions of dollars and possibly trillions from an orderly and staggered sale over a few years of the most lucrative (and environmentally noncontroversial) lands.
Now, where to start cutting?
[*]
Eliminate the DEA and the SEC. Since the SEC failed to catch Madoff, despite nine years of warnings, I think its $950 million annual budget is obviously a waste of money. The DEA's $1.9 billion budget in 2007 also strikes me as counterproductive. Beyond the issues of violent gangs and judicial corruption, there is the fact that this is a recession and we need to cut costs. If you're afraid of your kid doing drugs, have a serious talk and then make him watch this movie. And if he's still keen on the idea, I'm not sure the DEA is going to stop him. (By the way, the DEA and SEC employees get the same deal as the laid-off IRS personnel.)
Cut the Pentagon budget in half. In FY 2008 it was (officially) some $460 billion,so that cut alone would free up $230 billion per year. This isn't an article about foreign policy, so we won't be specific about how the military could achieve such cuts. But if you're worried that the country would suddenly be overrun by Iranian tanks, the following chart should reassure you:
I like how Ravi blasts the author for making a bomb joke, but never once chastized DavidS for his comments about nuking mecca during the Hajj.
