Painless and Easy Ways to Cut $83 Billion
Eric Zuesse notes that this year’s subsidy to Wall Street – $83 billion – exactly equals the amount of the this year’s sequester cuts.
Spiegel reports that ending the failed “war on drugs” would pay for the sequester cuts by itself:
Harvard University professor Jeffrey Miron has advocated the legalization of drugs for decades.
***
Miron: [P]rohibiting drugs is expensive.
SPIEGEL: How expensive?
Miron: If it legalized drugs, the United States could save $85 billion to $90 billion per year. Roughly half that is spent on the current drugs policy and half that is lost in taxes that the state could have levied on legal drugs.
(Of course, stopping government support for drug dealers might be one place to start.)
And there are many other painless and easy ways to cut $83 billion per year.
I certainly agree, our strategy over there is dopey!
Well, if the purpose of the War On Drugs was to provide an excuse for an ever more intrusive surveillance state, SWATing, APCs and real “assault rifles” for the Po-Leese, filling up privately run prisons to (in some cases) use the convicts for slave labor, and condition the sheeple to think that someone is a crazed criminal for thinking about putting certain molecular configurations into their body (while the same atoms arranged differently are more insidious and “perfectly legal”), then the War On Drugs has worked perfectly!
Did I miss anything?
Fast & Furious.
The cartels need high powered weapons (and grenades, apparently) so the ‘other’ side of this so-called ‘war’ has something to fight back with.