Secretary Gates creates incentive program to find $7 billion in savings and unnecessary elements of Defense budget.  According to William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary this is not just another effort at eliminating waste. This is an effort to change the way the defense department prioritizes its budget:

“You are not going to be able to do it just on pure efficiencies. You are going to have to eliminate lower-priority programs. You are going to have to find headquarters that you don’t think you need. You are going to have to find staffs that you think you can cut.”

 In a related story “fiscal” conservatives like John Boehner, frequently heard belittling others for their spending ways, did not step up to remove a $485 million anonymous earmark that was added to a House defense authorization bill. CNN reports:

 ”At issue is the alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter platform, a corporate subsidized boondoggle that has cost taxpayers $1.2 billion in earmarks since 2004. It is estimated to cost at least $2.9 billion more until its completion.”

Secretary of Defense Gates has advised President Obama to veto the effort if it makes it to the White House.

Michael Kinsley analyzes the motivations of the Tea Party Patriots:

What unites them is a more abstract resentment, an intensity of feeling rather than any concrete complaint or goal…

The Tea Party movement’s goals, when stated specifically, are mostly self-interested. And they lack poetry: cut my taxes; don’t let the government mess with my Medicare; and so on. I say “self-interested” and not “selfish” because pursuing your own self-interest is not illegitimate in a capitalist democracy. (Nor is poetry an essential requirement.) But the Tea Party’s atmospherics, all about personal grievance and taking umbrage and feeling put-upon, are a far cry from flower power. There is a nasty, sour, vindictive tone to the Tea Party that certainly existed in the antiwar movement and its offspring, but never dominated the atmosphere created by these groups…

To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?

According to the Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Americans paid on  average 9.2% of personal income in taxes in 2009. Since 1950, the tax rate, including federal, state and local taxes (income, property, sales and other taxes) averaged 12%.

Americans hate taxes, and taxes have been cut. But, why does government continue to grow? Well it’s because the American people demand services at the same time they demand smaller government.  Republicans and Democrats both know this. Both parties spend like a teenager with a credit card trying to cater to their contituencies. The problem. Ask the typical American where they would cut spending and tell them their options are:

1. Defense and international security (21 percent of the budget, or $625 billion)
2. Social Security (21 percent of the budget, or $617 billion)
3. Major Health Programs (Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP: 20 percent of the budget, or $599 billion - $391 billion of it for Medicare)

What are Americans willing to cut? According to the Economist/YouGov poll  everyone agrees on cutting Foreign Aid, but most avoid the cuts that are needed most. (Futility of Budget Cuts )

The Boston Globe reports that Harvard, MIT, Wellesley, Brandeis, Brown, Dartmouth, and Holy Cross have now increased their annual for tuition, room and board, and mandatory fees to over $50,000. It also points out that Tufts, Boston University, Boston College, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Babson had already exceed this mark.

“Higher education analysts say prices continue to rise for a multitude of reasons. Colleges need more money to hire star faculty and build luxurious dorms and other amenities to lure students. The cost to educate students at top private schools greatly exceeds the amount of tuition charged, because of constant upgrades to technology and the addition of new academic programs, college officials say.”

However, even though the cost exceeds $50k, the net national average that a student pays is $21,240 due to financial aid in the form of loans,  tax-payer funded grants and college endowments.

“Neal McCluskey, higher education analyst at the Cato Institute, believes that is one of the biggest drivers of college price increases. Much of college costs are covered not by families, but through other sources such as loans, taxpayer-funded grants, and college endowments. Increases in federal student aid, he said, just encourages institutions to continue raising their prices.”

Bruce Bartlett reacts in the appropriately titled “David Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind” to the news that David Frum is out at AEI.

His Waterloo post on Sunday condemning Republicans for failing to work with Democrats on healthcare reform was the final straw.

Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI “scholars” on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

(bold added)