I’ve been living in Central America for the last few months, splitting my time between the city of La Ceiba, Honduras and a small village nearby. I know Conservative leadership may find it hard to believe anything of value could come from such an undeveloped location besides the cheap labour they enjoy in their mansions while officially denouncing it. Despite what they may think, however, Central American governments have a lot of experience in balancing budgets while lowering taxes for the wealthy. Honduran leaders have actually been chosen by the CIA throughout history based solely on their ability to do just that: the job requirement for the Honduran President, as seen by the leaders of the US, has been to balance their budget for the IMF while keeping taxes low for US based corporations. And contrary to what US leaders may think about the unsophisticated behaviour of our southern neighbours, Honduras recently showed the kind of patriotism Glenn Beck would be proud of: they overthrew what seemed like a democratically elected President when he attempted to raise the country’s minimum wage and in doing so became a dictator.
So let’s be open minded, and look at some ways of cutting wasteful spending that come from an unlikely source. Here are six simple cuts we can make to, like Honduras, avoid some of our wasteful big government excesses.
Trash collecting and dumps
It’s pretty disgusting when you think about how much our government spends rounding up trash and putting it in a place where we don’t have to look at it everyday. In most of Honduras they don’t waste money on garbage, or on dumps in places where big business could otherwise be prospering. Instead, garbage lines the streets, is burned, or is thrown into the ocean to drift further down the coast as someone else’s problem. What’s the problem with this method of dealing with trash? You can always just throw that candy wrapper down in a public park, the public beach, or some other socialist created common space, and the law will still keep people from dumping trash on private property. What do we need clean public spaces for in a free society? Is it really fair that we should be required to waste money on big trucks representing big government coming to gather up our trash?
Used school buses
In Central America the public buses are yellow USA school buses that were taken out of commission because they’re too old to past safety inspections in the States. So because of big government regulation and meddling in our lives we are forced to pay taxes for newer, safer buses for our children to ride on. What would a few more bus crashes be in exchange for the money we could save buying our school buses second hand from other countries? The sucker socialists in Europe can keep wasting their taxpayer dollars on such ridiculous luxuries as safe transit and we’ll get the last laugh when we buy them used at bargain prices. In fact, many Latin American countries have recently elected more socialist oriented leaders who want to waste more money on services for their people, and a decent amount of those leaders have so far survived the CIA. Maybe these new governments will implement some type of safety standards for transit, and will be willing to sell us our second hand buses back third hand, saving us even more money in wasteful spending! We could experiment with the used buses in heavily Latino areas first, to teach those selfish immigrants a lesson. They thought they could escape their birthright of riding second hand buses as easily as they have? Simply by running across the desert for days, leaving their families behind, and moving to a country where they don’t understand the language to work for minimum wage? Guess again suckers, you’re going to ride old, unsafe buses here too!
Paying teachers
The US state governments keep resorting to the inefficient practice of cutting out public school teachers in batches of 100 – 200 at a time to save money. Honduran leadership actually found a brilliant, far more efficient way to cut wasteful spending on education, and blame the teachers in the process. The government simply lowered teacher wages enough that the teachers now refuse to work for what they are paid. In the last year public school teachers in the country have been on strike because of unpaid wages and spending cuts for a third of the school year. So not only has the government saved money by paying the teachers a sub-standard wage, but it saves more when they strike. It’s a brilliant two for one blow to wasteful government spending!
Of course, there are those typical liberal elitists out there and their obsession with education. They will reason that getting rid of public education completely will set our economy up for failure in the future, and make other silly, elitist arguments about the right to education. These arguments are ridiculous because American children will still have the same option that Honduran children who want to learn reading and writing have: be born to richer parents who can afford private school!
Emissions testing
This useless practice is really a combination of big governments obsession with regulation and its desire to spend all of our money. Cars in the States all have to have a little sticker that proves that they don’t let off too many fumes, and can you imagine how much money is wasted on this testing and printing the stickers?
In Honduras, private citizens have the right to send as much smog into the air and neighbourhood as they damn well please, and the used school buses we send them sure take advantage of this to the fullest. What reason is there that in the land of the free we restrict how much poison cars can send out into the air at all? Everyone knows freedom means the freedom to pollute, just ask BP!
Of course, we will have to wait until health care reform is repealed to get rid of emission testing completely, offering yet another reason to push ahead the repeal effort. If not, we would risk the savings to taxpayers being offset by all the medical bills from the asthmatic kids who breathed in too many free market emissions.
Bridge repairs
It’s a miracle, but big government sympathizers in the US still complain about our government not spending enough on infrastructure, just because we don’t have fancy trains like the silly socialists in Asia and Europe, with their elitist opposition to sitting in traffic for hours. Not enough spending on infrastructure? We spend embarrassingly large amounts on infrastructure compared to Honduras!
In the small town I used to live in Honduras the only bridge that directly connected the town to the main city was out of commission for three months, because Hondurans don’t waste money on ALWAYS having someone available to fix important bridges immediately when they break. People survived without the bridge. When the water level was low they could drive through the river it crossed, and when the water was high they could go an hour out of their way to take a different road around. In fact, longer delays to fix bridges could even help stimulate the US economy by forcing people to spend more money on gas to detour around the broken bridges. Imagine the pathetic waste of money when the US government sometimes spends money on fixing bridges quickly, when it could be stimulating the economy by leaving them in disrepair!
Disaster relief
It’s kind of embarrassing to talk about, but the United States government actually spends money on giving people reasonable housing if a natural disaster destroys the ones they have.
A few months ago, most of the neighbourhoods in La Ceiba got flooded by a tropical storm, and rather than properly house the people whose houses were destroyed, the government stuck then in gymnasiums and other athletic arenas. The US government could save…what’s that? Oops forgot. Guess the Hondurans learned that one from us. Maybe we don’t have as far to go as I thought!
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