The Bloated Bureaucracy Begging for Budget Cuts

Oooh, looky here: a bloated gubmit bureaucracy wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and violating American citizens' freedom and liberty by creating a fascist security state.

Repugs must be all over this one for massive, agency-killing budget cuts, right?

Right?

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

Police and military types have an overwhelming lust for the latest, greatest and most expensive technology -- and a talent for rationalizing the budget expenditures. Since 9/11, it's been one long Christmas list of weapons of war and anti-terror, and Santa Congress denies very little. In the meantime, anything that directly benefits We The People gets slashed. It's time, as this LA Times article suggests, that we take a much closer look at what we get for all that money. I'd also like to suggest a name change - "Homeland Security" reminds me very much of Nazis:

A decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, federal and state governments are spending about $75 billion a year on domestic security, setting up sophisticated radio networks, upgrading emergency medical response equipment, installing surveillance cameras and bomb-proof walls, and outfitting airport screeners to detect an ever-evolving list of mobile explosives.

But how effective has that 10-year spending spree been?

"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

"So if your chance of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is 1 in 3.5 million, the question is, how much do you want to spend to get that down to 1 in 4.5 million?" he said.

Sure, it's saved and created millions of emergency-response jobs across the country, but those are despicable, unionized public employees; fire them quick, before they hurt the feelings of private industry.

Digby:

If you build it, they will use it.

I guess you can call it government stimulus. And improving emergency response is one positive result, for sure. Still, I don't about you but I'd much rather that most of this money be spent fixing our crumbling infrastructure and teaching our young than creating a massive security state.

I've been worried about this since they first named this monstrous new police bureaucracy "Homeland Security." Nothing good could possible come from that.

SNIP

The LA Times piece is worth reading as it puts into perspective the real risks out there in comparison to cost. It's substantial and it should be part of any discussions we have going forward about budgets. (Not that we will --- anything in a uniform is sacrosanct in our free society nowadays.) But for me, the primary concern is that the US had built a monolithic federal, state and local police apparatus that must constantly seek to justify its existence. And I think we know where that sort of thing ends up don't we?

Liberals know that balancing individual freedom and rights with law enforcement and security is a never-ending battle requiring constant attention and fine-tuning. Repugs just throw billions of tax dollars at it, and damn the Fourth Amendment.