The values expressed by the June 1^st made-up deadline for the debt ceiling talks were that it was a bi-partisan agreement, which prevents a first-ever default, protects Biden’s key priorities and accomplishments, and rejects extreme cuts to programs for veterans, seniors, and what families count on. It protects Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and keeps President Biden’s student loan relief program for 40 million hardworking borrowers. That is what the White House is saying about it, and it’s the kind of deal you will always get from a corrupt government with a serious spending problem. And the feeling is that Keven McCarthy got suckered even though members of Congress I like from my area; Jim Jordan and Warren Davidson were happy to push back a bit from the Republican perspective; ultimately, these budget fights are going to get messy and would have been better done now than later. Essentially, Republicans bit on the phony deadline for debt payments that Janet Yellen set from the Biden administration, and House Republicans didn’t want to be blamed for a default. We are dealing with radical employees here; it’s precisely the same argument we have been making for years in public schools where the government simply adds too much payroll, then expects taxpayers to pick up their massive expansion of government through job creation, then overpaying those employees. I tend to agree with Davidson and Jordan that McCarthy played a nice game, but in the end, there weren’t wins to justify the effort, and the Biden Democrats get to celebrate a win at taxpayer expense. 

We aren’t all on the same page with this one. The government needs to be radically shrunk, and it will put a lot of people out of work. The entire issue of these budget talks really comes down to whether we are a better nation with all the government workers we have who do so little for the nation in general. Most government workers make 30-40% above market value for jobs that aren’t needed in most cases. And we could likely afford to cut 75% of those and still get an operational government, much like Elon Musk did at Twitter. Real people who run real companies understand that budget impacts on the payroll are the biggest problem of inflated budgets. If employees get increased productivity with their staffing, and that productivity is valuable to the world, then a company could be said to be successful. But we’re not talking about that with this budget problem with our government. Government is a make-work enterprise where they fill positions we don’t need and pay people too much money to perform the job. I would say that the utilization rate of those employees is under 5%, where it should be somewhere between 70% to 90%. That’s the effective time employees are actually doing their jobs while being paid. What we are dealing with when it comes to government workers are lazy radicals who are hidden from job performance by government labor unions who continue to want to throw bodies at positions they create to expand government and take credit for it as politicians. And politicians are never going to give those jobs away without a major fight. And this debt ceiling talk of 2023 would have required people negotiating who actually want to fight. 

And the kryptonite for Republicans is always military spending, but even with that topic, do we really want to waste money on a woke military? In my view of this problem, everything is on the table. What does our military really do for us these days? It seems to only serve for wars that help globalism. It’s not preventing war with China. China has their guy in our White House. They are fighting wars through finance now; nobody is planning to fight a ground war now or in the future. So, Republicans need to be willing to go there. And they must be willing to take away the credit cards from big-spending Democrats and let them have their head-spinning moments. At some point, we are going to have to call the bluff of the big government types and stop wasting money on these massive government programs in every category. Lots of people need to lose their jobs, and a resizing of the real needs of our federal and state government needs to occur because, at the core of it, that is what we are talking about with these talks. Nobody wants to end well-paying jobs for a government that know-nothing politicians created for a job that society generally doesn’t want or need. We are going into debt to do jobs so that foreign interests can make money off the interest rate, and the only entities benefiting are the communist labor unions attached to the government workers. It’s a treadmill that goes nowhere, and we waste all our time and money on essentially nothing. Our nation has not improved because of all the money wasted on these jobs, and the economic value is a negative rather than a positive. We are paying a lot of money to get in the way of productivity, not to enhance it. 

And that’s where the really hard decisions come into play. We all have family members who work in government and did what they needed to to get a job with the government at that overpaid rate, with all the days off and work-from-home policies we have seen over the past several years. Government workers don’t think they owe any productivity to society. They believe that society owes them a job and that they’ll show up for it whenever they get around to it; that is the true cost to the productivity of our culture. We are paying a lot of money for a government that doesn’t do what we need it to. And unless Kevin McCarthy was willing to argue on those merits, the Democrats would own him in the negotiations. McCarthy made a good show of it, working himself over the Memorial Day Holiday, but Democrats knew from the beginning that all the mainstream Republicans could not fight the budget battle where it is really the costliest. Nobody wants to admit that their friends, family, and fellow union members are actually performing worthless tasks for a worthless government. Eventually, we will have to have this discussion because it is what makes deficit spending such a catastrophe. One that few, perhaps only the 20 or so freedom caucus members, are willing even to discuss. Government, in general, with all their labor unions attached at every level, is a bloated machine of communist corruption of no value, and to be a healthy country, those government jobs need to be private sector jobs at a much lower wage rate. And that would essentially destroy the inflated economy of the Beltway culture that entirely exists on debt, not the actual value of the jobs that fuel that economy. Then until we are willing to have that discussion, which is inevitable, we will continue to see debt ceiling discussions like this one with precisely these results. Kevin McCarthy never had a chance because he was making the wrong argument. The government positions that make up the bloated budget we are dealing with need to go away. People will have to be out of work. And the government will have to be significantly minimized, by 75% or more, because anything productive never happens. And we are a long way from that happening with these government politicians. A long way away from reality.

Rich Hoffman