It’s not so much waste it’s that they want it controlled by private institutions. The hard right economic is essentially that as soon as the government gets involved with it private business is forced out and can’t compete, and that this is an intrusion of the state into contract and private rights and thus tyranny. This goes well with the populist right often for social and cultural reasons. The problem is that we’ve been there, and the consequences are horrid. Here are just some of their goals.
Get rid of the Department of Education. The corporations would like all of this privatized so they can make a buck on it, they’d also like to kill off the teachers unions which are democratic voting blocks. This would essentially fuck over everyone who doesn’t have the cash to send their kid to one of the top private schools. The side benefit for the right is that you get to go to the Goldman Sachs School (and learn all about free markets!), and the social conservatives don’t have to send their kids to schools that teach evolution, that being gay is biological, and there will be no sex education or any of that pesky environmental science.
Get rid of the EPA. Corporations obviously want the EPA gone because the EPA fines them millions of dollars for toxic dumping and helps people win lawsuits against them. Social conservatives and populists just want to be able to flush anti-freeze down their lawns and not worry about fuel emissions on their cars, with a side bit of “if we just drill for oil everywhere it will be cheaper”.
End the FED. The FED is responsible for making sure our economy has some liquidity. The rich hate that because the FED will devalue money to prevent hundreds of thousands of people from landing in the streets starving. Plus they want to go back to private individuals being able to print their own gold backed money. Back in the day if you worked for Sony Sony would give you Sony dollars. The problem was you could only spend them at the Sony store, the Microsoft store only took Microsoft dollars, so the company got all the money it paid it’s own people back in sales. Great for corporations, but you’re fucked if your not one.
End unemployment/the minimum wage/medicaid. This is an odd one because there is a lot of truth in that college grads will sit on unemployment for absurd amounts of time because they think they are too good for the jobs that are out there. But what the corporations want is to pay us the same wages as the Chinese get to increase profit, and without any unemployment insurance people will take those jobs and no minimum wage will let them pay you a buck an hour.
End Social Security. This one is a bit testier but make no mistake if you make over 250k a year you want that shit gone. It helps people on the lower end of the economic scale and prevents seniors for dieing off in the streets. But the thing is it’s a massive amount of money, and if it didn’t exist people would be forced to gamble all that cash on the stock market and values would go through the roof. If you’re rich you get out of paying for something you have no intention of using and your investments get to gamble with a few hundred billion more bucks, if you’re not rich you’re fucked though.
Waste isn’t really the problem. The issue is that the right never wanted the new deal, never wanted any sort of worker protections (they are pushing for 7 day work weeks and 12 hour days as well), and has never accepted any of this. And while this exclusively helps the rich, the social conservatives are onboard with it as it will force people into the church for a social safety net and their education.
But don’t make the mistake that waste has fuck all to do with any of it.
