Matt Taibbi Quotes
America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.
Taibbi, Matt. Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America. Spiegel & Grau, 2010, p. 1.
Many politicians had been complaining that the CDC and NIH had not trained more community hospital staffs in infectious disease protection techniques when the Ebola problem came to America. However, the budgets for these kinds of activities had been cut back each of the recent previous years. Lee made the assumption that Congress wanted government to work. In actuality there was a strong core of legislators in that Congress, who wanted government to fail so that citizens would tire of spending money on failures and thereby shrink the size of government. The members of Congress who wanted government to be effective however at that time had other more dramatic uses of money that training and capacity building of local hospitals.
In the non-defense side of the budget a very large proportion of the budget is for entitlements like Social Security and Mediacre which are obligations that must be paid. The remainder, the smaller part is everything else--funding the cabinet departments, all the medical and sdcientific research, all the federal aid to public dchools and police departments, all the welfare, foodstamp and other programs for the poor, the costs of the Federal COurt System, the White House, the Congress, the State Department, foreign aid, Homeland security, weatehr forcasting, all the agricultural programs, and viirtually everything the governmetn does. In 2017 President Donals Trump submitted a budget to COngress that increased defense spending by a fulll 10 percent, and gave a hugh tax cut for the wealthy and the corporations. To balance the budget, he propsoed eliminateing man of the existing progrms like "Meals on Wheels" which brings at least 1 hot meal a day to homebound poor eldertly people, and a host of other critical programs. He had no previous experience with a government budget which was thoudands of times larger and more complex than any budget he had ever seen. So many in Congress, in both partiesd, were very critical of the budget and Congress then started to create its own buget. This quote expressed the heart of the problem.
Although the Professor was often right about this technique, at the time he made this statement, the Clinton administration was actually cutting spending and using much of the revenue to pay for the deficit—just the opposite of what the Professor was worried about. It was successful and the deficit was eliminated and surpluses were projected. However the succeeding administration more closely followed the professor’s pattern and increased spending enormously for serious needs, but also cut taxes, so that we went during the Bush administration from the largest projected surplus in American history to the greatest deficit in American history.
In subsequent years military officers got around this restriction by privately expressing confidential opinions to members of Congress and the press. In the Iraq war for example most senior military officers felt that more troops were needed in Iraq. However, since the President decided on the final troop count only one official, the Army Chief of Staff, has publicly expressed the view that it was insufficient. He was retired early. The stricture still stands.
Commenting on the surplus in the fund:
Matthew C. Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. He is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, author of several books, co-host of Useful Idiots, and publisher of a newsletter on Substack.
