An old liberal friend of mine posted a link to this article on FB

“IRS Cuts Would Mean Loss Of Essential Services, $4 Billion In Revenue”

And commented the link with

this doesnt seem smart as much as i hate the irs

My response:

My take from this is that it yet again demonstrates that Washington does not get it.

IRS Budget in 2008 was 11.4 Billion
In 2010 it was 12.1 Billion (increase of 700 Million)
Proposed for 2012 is 13.4 Billion (increase of 1.2 Billion)

So from 2008 to the proposed 2012 budget is an increase of 2 Billion.

So supposedly if only INCREASING their budget by 600 Million rather that 1.2 Billion will lead to catastrophe and the world coming to and end. Get real.

He showed his Big Government default Liberal mindset with

It seems stupid to decrease funding when we get such a high return on investment. I don’t know why we would fuss with an agency that makes money for the gov. I’m all for cutting but this seems like cutting off our nose… I don’t think anyone thinks the world will end. Well, not over this anyway…

So I tried to show how the Government just does not have a clue how things work in the real world

funding is not being DECREASED it is just not being INCREASED as much but it is still an INCREASE.

The current rate of inflation in the US is 3.8%. Boosting the IRS Budget from 2011’s $12.1 Billion to $13.4 Billion is an increase of 10.7% Increasing it only by $600 million is still an increase of 4.9%. Seems that 4.9% is still larger than 3.8% so the IRS would still be getting a budget increase that exceeds the rate of inflation.

The problem is that their budget is basically on auto-pilot increase year to year due to the nonsense called “Base-line” budgeting. The real world does not operate like that, especially in a recession.

Reminds me the last time we had a real estate meltdown with the Savings & Loan debacle.

I was working for Valley National Bank (later bought by BankOne and then Chase) at the time. The President and CEO of the Bank announced to the operations side of the Bank that our budgets were frozen at the current level for the next two years and that any new purchases, hires, raises, etc… would have to be made to fit within that cap.

Well, finding efficiencies was the name of the game.

One of the projects I helped spearhead was to do a drop to bottom review of the existing technology utilization within the Bank.

Our team went into every Department to evaluate how the current technology was being used and interview every employee within that department. We ended up taking more powerful systems away from Managers and swapping them out with their Assistants who were the actual power users. We even identified that two or three people could share a system or printer and thereby pull one or two systems back to Equipment Services so that they could be reallocated within the Bank thereby saving on purchasing additional equipment.

The Bank emerged from that time very Healthy with our Branch system intact and in fact we had created Profit Centers within the Operations side of the Bank that generated our “own” money. Since we had a large Branch system all over the State we created a new company called “BancStar”. All of our Courier Vans were transferred to this new company and rebranded with the new company’s logo. We created a new piece of mapping software to allow us to plot routes. We then sold time in our Vans to other Banks to handle their intra-Branch mail since we would certainly be passing by their branches while driving to our own. They got rid of a cost since we could do it cheaper then they could and we offset a lot of or expense in the delivery of our own mail, etc…

When Mitch Daniels became Governor of Indiana he faced a $1 Billion deficit. He turned that around to a $700 Million dollar surplus by doing the same type things that w did at the Bank. Look for real efficiencies and “cut” where things be could cut. One thing they did that I thought was brilliant was he had someone go out and mark the tires on vehicles in the States fleet. Then like the Meter Maid they went back a month later to see what vehicles had been used and which had not. The excess vehicles were sold off. In fact the Governor personally sold off vehicle #1,000 with at the time of the link below the state had identified 2,000 Vehicles it was not using fully and could get rid of.

http://www.votesmart.org/speech_detail.php?sc_id=184301&keyword&phrase&contain

Every level of Government is rife with that kind of waste.

Yes, there will be push back from the affected Departments. We had that too at the Bank and knowing that going in we setup a process to resolve it. We would give our recommendations to the Department Manager and he could comment. We would take his comment under consideration and submit a revised recommendation to him in case we had missed something. If the Manager still did not agree the resolution was kicked all the way upstairs to the President of the Bank by-passing all the Middle Management layers. We insisted on that so that we knew we had buy in from above. The very first Department we evaluated rejected our initial recommendations out of hand (we had been very gentle) and upon review we decided to go with what we really wanted to adjust. The Manager pitched a fit. The review went to the Presidents office and the next thing we knew that entire Department had been disbanded and the employees transferred around the Bank.

Once that word got out we did not have another Manager question our recommendations. I always wondered if that first Department we reviewed had been picked to send that very message.

It is so funny when someone doubles and triples down on their inaccuracies rather then admit they were simply mistaken (not that they were even wrong). Finally rather than admit that were even mistaken and then finally wrong they delete their original post so as to not have to endure the painful truth.

When faced with someone like that is fun to box and bat them like a cat with a ball of yarn.

But then that is what screen captures are for…

Frank and Sharon’s inanity on the Nearly Famous Barry Young Fan Page

We have a spending problem not a taxing problem

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One of my clients here in Phoenix is a prominent Immigration Attorney, Nic Suriel.  This video is from 2010 when he was making an appearance on the local Fox Affiliate to discuss Immigration in general and SB1070 in particular.

Nic and I have had some good discussions on the topic.  He is always insightful as he brings both a Personal as well as a Professional perspective to the debate.

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FYI, here is my personal take on SB1070 that was written a few months before this interview.  While I support a “High Walls” approach I also acknowledge and agree with the point that Nic drives home in the interview of the need for “Wider Gates”

Last night Ron put on display one of my biggest criticisms of him

Ron Paul is completely flummoxed when pressed on working with a divided Congress (see the 1:28 mark). Besides his raise the draw bridges and legalize heroin and crack cocaine stances this is his biggest problem. He has no record of working with others so he has no answer on how he would accomplish anything.

One would think that his debate prep would at some point have prepared him to actually address this weakness with a strong answer. But then you would be wrong.

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$1 Trillion in cuts to government spending sounds like a lot.

Spread it over 10 years you get $100 Billion. Still sounds big.

The budget for 2011 is $3.7 Trillion. So the cut represent only 2.6%.

The budget goes up each year so these “cuts” will represent an ever shrinking percentage.

If you make $100k a year this would be like cutting $7 a day from your expenses.

Wow, what an incredible sacrifice.