–You never will know what you have lost. Part II

Mitchell’s laws: Reduced money growth never stimulates economic growth. To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments. Economic austerity causes civil disorder. Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
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In the post titled, “You never will know what you have lost,” I describe how deficit cutting invisibly reduces our standard of living.

Here is yet another example of how eliminating the federal government’s ability to enrich the economy will affect us all:

Top federal watchdog faces budget cuts
Washington Post, By Ed O’Keefe, 10/03/2011

(The Government Accountability Office), the nation’s most prominent federal watchdog, often credited with identifying potential taxpayer savings, may soon fall victim to steep government spending cuts.

(This agency) stands to lose up to $50 million in funding this year that its defenders say would force widespread layoffs and the closure of its regional offices. Current budget proposals also would force the agency to detail the costs and manpower used to publish each of its reports, a task that supportive lawmakers fear could politicize the nonpartisan office.

More people on the unemployment rolls. That should “help” the economy.

GAO publishes more than 1,000 reports and audits annually, and agency officials frequently testify before congressional committees to detail their findings. Despite its relatively spot-free reputation and the billions of dollars in potential savings it has identified in recent years, House and Senate appropriators responsible for drafting the legislative branch budget seem determined to force the GAO to reduce, as part of a 5.2 percent drop in all congressional spending.

As Washington seeks ways to cut back, “the buck shrinks here,” said Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee on the legislative branch. He said his proposed cuts “are real and will force Congress and the agencies on Capitol Hill to live with less.”
[…]
His proposed budget also would require GAO to include detailed spending reports with each publication it releases that account for how many employees worked on the report, the total hours spent producing it and a tally of related travel expenses.

Nelson’s proposals are infuriating several of his Senate colleagues, particularly Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a frequent critic of government spending who often relies on GAO to help him root out cases of waste, fraud and abuse.

Requiring detailed spending reports would “be an overly burdensome mandate that would further consume GAO’s dwindling resources without providing any obvious cost benefit,” Coburn and four other colleagues wrote last week in a letter sent to Nelson’s subcommittee. No other congressional office — including the Congressional Research Service, which also publishes thousands of reports — is required to provide detailed spending totals, they said.

Day by day, we die the death of a thousand invisible cuts, at the hands of people who know not what they do – like doctors who would cure anemia by bleeding the patient with leeches.

As I said in that earlier post:

The list goes on and on: The lame who might have walked. The blind who might have seen. The children who might have given to America. The tornados and hurricanes and earthquakes that might have been foreseen or stopped. The money that investors might have saved. The inventions never invented. The recessions and depressions that might have been avoided. The wars that might have been won or prevented. The life-saving drugs that might have been developed. The people who might not have died too soon. The beauty never created. The ideas lost. The better world that might have been. You never will know.

And we trade all this potential for the reality of a meaner, uglier, less elegant life, especially for the lower classes, who will be affected most by deficit reduction, though we all will be affected. What a waste, given the tools we’ve been given, that we intentionally should deprive ourselves and our children and our grandchildren of the benefits a society can offer, and instead retreat toward the days of hardscrabble anarchy.

What have we lost? What will we lose tomorrow? You never will know.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com

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No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia. The key equation in economics: Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY